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AMBUSH 






“ ‘ And you , Joan , you knezu ’ he began. 

i Only the — the — truth , Paul,’ Joan cried.” 



AMBUSH 


BY 

SAMUEL ALEXANDER WHITE 

w 



FRONTISPIECE 

BY 

RALPH PALLEN COLEMAN / 


GARDEN CITY NEW YORK 

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 

1920 




/ 


COPYRIGHT, 1930, BY 
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE * COMPANY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OF 
TRANSLATION INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, 
INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN 


JUl 1.7 1920 


COPYRIGHT, 1918, BY THE RIDGWAY COMPANY 


JL 


V 


©Cl. A 5 70 74 8 




CONTENTS 


CHAPTER PAGE 

I. A Change of Couriers .... 3 

II. Grande Portage 17 

III. An Interrupted Banquet . . . 33 

IV. Ambuscade 48 

V. The Iliad of the Forest ... 64 

VI. The Dead Arise 83 

VII. Trade War 95 

VIII. The Price of a Kiss 114 

IX. Mutiny 133 

X. The Red Death 152 

XI. Oochemegou Kesigow .... 178 

XII. The Sorcery of Spring .... 198 

XIII. A Skin for a Skin 212 

XIV. In the Temple of the Wild . . 281 


AMBUSH 













































CHAPTER ONE 


A CHANGE OF COURIERS 

The blood-red, five-pointed stars emblazoned 
on the warm yellow bows of the seven birch-bark 
canoes which skirted Lake Superior’s north shore 
advertised the fleet as a Hudson’s Bay Company 
brigade. The predominancy of James Bay Crees 
among the crews told that the brigade was fresh 
from one of the bay posts — in all probability 
Moose Factory, and that the route of travel had 
been up the Moose and Missinabie rivers, across 
the Height of Land, and down theMichipicoten to 
the broad and restless bosom of Superior itself. 

Also, the magnificence of the leading canoe and 
the elaborate costumes of its occupants pro- 
claimed it a Factor’s craft. A splendid six- 
fathom canoe, moulded, sewn, and gummed by 
master aborigine hands, it glided lightly as foam 
under the urge of half-a-dozen Indian paddlers: 
bowsman, steersman, two middlemen paired 
forward, two paired aft. 

In the bow fluttered the crimson flag of the 
Ancient and Honourable Company. From the 
stern streamed a long gonfalon of the same shade, 
crisping and crackling in the wind and slapping 
its pennant-like tip with a resounding smack 
upon the passing wave crests. 

3 


4 


AMBUSH 


From the paddle shafts blew streamers of 
gaudy wool, and these flying gleams of colour 
mingled with the glint of bright-beaded moc- 
casins, red and blue leggings, flaming belts and 
scarves, brilliant fillets bound about the black- 
haired heads carrying still more brilliant feathers, 
long, graceful plumes dyed in violent colours, 
which slanted back on the wearers’ shoulders and 
marked them as trusted canoemen of a Factor. 

The Factor himself, a young man compared to 
the aging priest who shared his place amidships, 
half sat, half reclined upon a rich robe of snow- 
white ermine skin. The priest was dressed 
sombrely, cowled and cassocked in black after 
the fashion of Jesuit missionaries, with canvas 
gauntlets upon his hands and a mosquito veil 
covering his face, but rich as the robe they both 
reclined upon was the young man’s every gar- 
ment, fastidious, distinctive, elegant, at once 
suiting a personality of superior tastes and fitting 
his rank as an overlord of the mighty company. 

Upon abnormally heavy shoulders he wore a 
blanket-cloth coat of a rare fawn colour. 

Across his wide chest the coat was thrown open 
to the sweeping lake breeze, and, underneath, a 
low-collared shirt of fine flannel, also unbuttoned, 
fluttered and crinkled and bellied, revealing his 
huge deltoids and the great muscled ridges ex- 
tending from neck to shoulder. His lower limbs 
were clothed in short trousers of creamy deer- 
skin tanned soft and pliable as chamois and 
meeting summer moccasins of the same material, 
high-cut above the calf -like winter shoe-packs. 


A CHANGE OF COURIERS 


5 


A massive frame he possessed, and possessed 
it proudly. Rugged like the neck was the head 
that rose above it; the clean-shaven, well- 
rounded jaw hollowed above the chin; the mouth 
full and firm, nose straight and spaciously 
nostrilled for the big lungs; cheek-bones high 
and well-fleshed, hollowing the face again in 
front of the small, close-set ears. 

Hair short-cropped and clean of scalp, his head 
was covered with a cap of soft amber leather, the 
visor peak of which shaded his gray eyes from the 
sun. Calm, self-reliant, determined, yet with 
the flash of the youthful spirit in them tempered 
by a wealth of experience, the eyes looked ahead 
over Superior’s rollers toward the rock-ram- 
parted, spruce-sentinelled shore, and his voice 
when he spoke belied nothing of the masterful- 
ness of his frame, his face, or his eye. 

It was a deep voice, strong and resonant, 
thrilling with a peculiar timbre which betrayed 
the fact that he was accustomed to read aloud 
from books or perhaps make oration to gather- 
ings of traders and tribes. It was the voice of 
one in authority, one who supremely commands, 
decrees the law. 

44 Look, Father Andrews,” he exulted, extend- 
ing a powerful brown, mobile hand, “yonder is 
our island. It hides the bay behind. Eugene 
Drummond will meet us in Grande Portage to- 
night, and to-morrow we shall be well on our way 
to our new district.” 

“But are you sure your voyageur will not fail 
you, Carlisle?” hazarded Father Andrews. 


6 


AMBUSH 


“Eugene never fails me,” declared Carlisle, 
with a shake of his head. “Last fall when I 
got news of my transfer this summer from 
Moose Factory to Cumberland House and sent 
him in to spy out the land, I gave him especial 
warning to be at Grande Portage not later than 
July the ninth. I told him I would reach there 
to-day, the ninth, on my way to Cumberland 
House, and he was under orders to lead the 
brigade on. No, he will not fail!” 

With a swing of his body he twisted his head 
and nodded to his 0 jib way steersman. 

“The channel, Missowa!” he directed in the 
O jib way dialect. 

“Ae, Factor,” returned Missowa who was 
standing up to his work in the high-curved stem. 
And in a different, guttural tone he added the 
laconic word — “Canoe!” 

“So?” demanded Carlisle, sitting erect to 
stare under his hand. “Maybe it’s the Iroquois 
Indian who passed without seeing us as we ate 
dinner down the shore.” 

“No Iroquois,” decided the Ojibway steers- 
man. “No Indian. White man. A man of 
the French Company.” 

“A Northwest Fur Company man, eh? Yes, 
Missowa, yes — I believe you are right.” 

For now he saw it was indeed the Northwest 
Fur Company’s livery that the approaching 
paddler wore, a Northwest canoe he paddled out 
through the molten wash of gold that the wester- 
ing sun spilled over the high, wooded mainland ridge 
where the Pigeon River brawled down to Superior. 


A CHANGE OF COURIERS 


7 


Like a Northwest voyageur passing out of 
Grande Portage Bay upon the customary even- 
ing fishing excursion the canoeman drifted, his 
slender paddle stirring the golden wash and 
gilding itself therein, his glistening yellow craft 
slanting like a shaft of sunshine from roller crest 
to roller trough and back again. 

But once outside the channel where the tree- 
crowned island which hid the bay screened him 
from sight of any one on shore, Carlisle noted a 
change in his attitude. From the casual pose of 
a fisherman he suddenly threw himself into the 
pose of one who runs a race, and paddling 
viciously, bore like a surf-rider down upon the 
Factor’s craft. 

Every time he retrieved his paddle after the 
plunge he caused it to touch the lake surface with 
a vicious forward poke which sent the spray 
spattering like shot against his canoe bow where 
the letters N. W. were smeared in black pitch. 
The smear seemed to annoy him, and at every 
splash the Factor could hear him growl low in 
his throat. 

“ Certainement” he reiterated, “I change you 
soon. I change you soon!” 

Twenty feet away, and still in mid-career, he 
whirled his prow with one flick of his paddle on 
to the nose of a cross-sea, and there he poised 
spectacularly, balancing with superb skill the 
while he threw the tasselled cap from his head 
into the canoe bottom and followed it with the 
red shirt stripped from his body. Naked to the 
waist, around which buckskin trousers were 


8 


AMBUSH 


loosely belted, lie stood silhouetted against the 
flaming disk of the sun, his short, squat, power- 
ful body, tanned to a smoky bronze, shining dull- 
red. 

All the time his expressive hands gesticulated. 
His volatile face, tanned like his body, creased 
itself in a cunning grin so that the milk-white 
teeth gleamed, the thin nostrils quivered, the 
coal-black eyes danced. The grin became a 
chuckle, and he tossed his head from side to side, 
streaming his raven hair this way and that in 
wild disorder on the whistling wind. 

“Eh, w’at you t’ink, camarades? ” he saluted 
as he stamped upon the discarded shirt. 

“ Drummond !” ejaculated Carlisle and Mis- 
sowa in one breath. 

“Om,” laughed the voyageur, “an’ glad to 
be rid of dat disguise! Once I scrape dat diable 
pitch off ma bows an’ paint dem wit’ de crimson 
star, I feel happy again.” 

Carlisle glanced aside at the priest with a 
quiet smile of vindication. 

“I told you, Father, that Eugene would not 
fail me,” he reminded. 

“Aye, Paul,” nodded Andrews, “and may all 
your subjects always be as faithful!” 

The Factor turned back to Eugene Drum- 
mond. 

“But why did you not wait in Grande Portage 
as I ordered?” he demanded. “ Why are you in 
that disguise, and why have you come down the 
lake to meet me?” 

“De Nor’westaires close Grande Portage,” 


A CHANGE OF COURIERS 


9 


announced Drummond, with a dramatic sweep of 
his arm. “ Nobody goes troo — Hudson’s Bay 
men, Free-Traders, nor anybody else.” 

Something like an imprecation rumbled in 
Carlisle’s throat. A wave of anger suffused and 
darkened the sun-bronze of his face, and his gray 
eyes widened, glinting hard. 

“They would try that?” he blurted in a voice 
so heavy that it was almost a bellow. “They 
would dare?” 

“Dey have dared,” assured the voyageur. 
“Dey claim her as Nor’ west ground. Ba gar, 
Factor, dis beeg fight dat t’reatens so long, she’s 
come at last. All troo de Saskatchewan w’ere 
you sent me spyin’ I be see de signs.” 

“What about our trade on the Saskatchewan 
now?” 

“It’s wan long report, an’ I’m have to geeve 
you de figures ashore, but to spik her brief, I’m 
find de Nor’westaires be winnin’ our trade. Oui 9 
and dere’s anodder winnin’ more dan us or de 
Nor’westaires.” 

“A Free-Trader, eh?” 

“ Certainement, wan American frontiersman 
named Ralph Wayne.” 

The six-fathom canoe gave a violent lurch. 
Father Andrews had started suddenly, and 
even as Carlisle gazed at him in mild surprise the 
priest viciously smote the palm of his left 
gauntlet down the back of his right. 

“A mosquito under your glove, eh, Father?” 
the Factor bantered, angry gravity disappearing 
from his face under the impulse of whimsical 


10 


AMBUSH 


laughter. “It takes more than canvas to stop 
those whining bloodsuckers.” 

The priest answered nothing, but while he 
rubbed his hand # Eugene Drummond gazed 
keenly at him across the twenty-foot water gap. 
For Andrews had been a mystery to Drummond 
ever since the first time he had set eyes on him. 
That was twenty-one years before when the 
priest had drifted up Lake Huron into Fort 
Michillimackinac in charge of the nine-year-old 
boy, Paul Carlisle. The boy’s father, so Andrews 
gave it out, was an English officer, Captain 
Charles Carlisle of Butler’s Rangers, stationed at 
Niagara, who had been killed in Butler’s raid upon 
the Wyoming Valley and who, being a widower, 
had left the boy in his charge. 

That was all Eugene Drummond knew of the 
history of either of the two, and the passing of 
twenty-one years had not increased his knowl- 
edge very much. True, he had seen young Paul 
schooled, given entrance as a clerk into the 
service of the great company, advanced little by 
little, transferred for a period to England where 
he managed the London fur sales and at the same 
time dipped into the higher learning, and finally 
made Factor of the important James Bay post of 
Moose Factory whence he was now moved to be 
lord of Cumberland House on the Saskatchewan. 

Although Andrews was his companion and 
guardian through it all, and Eugene Drummond 
was in almost constant contact with them in the 
Hudson’s Bay Company’s service, the voyageur 
had never solved the intangible mystery that he 


A CHANGE OF COURIERS IX 

fancied surrounded the priest. Never in those 
twenty-one years had Drummond fairly seen the 
man Andrews, his figure or his face. 

Always he looked upon a gown that seemed to 
him to shroud and to conceal, upon head-gear 
that was something of a mask. Now, in sum- 
mer, it was the heavy dun cowl and the thick 
mosquito veil. In winter it was the dun cowl 
and a fur-fringed, helmet-like hood on his capote 
that proved just as impenetrable. 

Drummond always imagined that if Andrews 
but dropped the mask his mystery would dis- 
solve, and the suspended possibility continually 
fretted and irritated him. Mon Dieu ! why 
could not the man be human like the rest of 
these large-thewed, tangible Northmen? He 
was tired of watching an elusive ghost flitting 
about in a black gown. And why le diable had 
Andrews started and lurched the canoe just now? 

Was it because of a mosquito bite or was it 
because he, Eugene, had voiced the name of 
Ralph Wayne? The voyageur determined to 
watch and see, but as he went on to speak 
further of the Free-Trader, his shrewd dark eyes 
could read nothing, for the priest now sat im- 
passive, still rubbing lightly the thumb of his 
left gauntlet along the back of his right. 

“Dis man Wayne is de great powaire in dat 
West,” elucidated Eugene, “an’ he be built wan 
stronghold Fort Wayne to defend hees district. 
He be de mightiest of de independents, de leader 
of dem all, an’ he be de enemy, as mooch as de 
Nor’westaires, dat we have to fight an’ absorb.” 


12 


AMBUSH 


Carlisle, listening, nodded ponderously, his 
face clouded, his forehead ridged in a frown, as if 
he weighed the voyageur’s news within himself 
and found it of heavy portent. His nod was a 
sign of complete understanding and an intima- 
tion for Eugene to go on. 

“So as well as to warn you about Grande 
Portage bein’ closed I be come out to tell you 
of dis man Wayne. He be beeg menace to de 
Nor’westaires, joost lak us, an’ dey’re goin’ to 
fight an’ absorb heem — queeck.” 

“How quick?” demanded the Factor. 

“Dis night. I sign on wit’ de Nor’westaires 
an’ wear deir clothes to get de information, an’ 
I’m come down from de West wit’ wan Lake 
Winnipeg brigade. We pass Wayne dis mornin’ 
on de Pigeon River. He be on hees way to 
Montreal wit’ hees season’s furs. He make de 
Portage dis evenin’. He ain’t know she’s closed. 

“De Nor’westaires tell heem w’en he come in, 
an’ den dey’re goin’ absorb heem on de spot. 
An’ dat ain’t de worst, eider. Hees daughter 
Joan Wayne be tra veilin’ wit’ heem to Montreal 
an’ de Nor’ west partners goin’ seize her along wit 
her father. Wan of de partners has hees eye on 
her dis long taim, so dey tell me in de post.” 

“Which partner?” Carlisle’s words slipped 
forth, sharp as slitting steel. 

“Richelieu!” 

“Then this thing’s serious, Eugene,” declared 
the Factor, “and it means that you and I have to 
get into Grande Portage this afternoon. We 
must meet Wayne’s brigade at the other end of 


A CHANGE OF COURIERS 


13 


the Portage and warn him and his daughter. We 
must do it for trade and other reasons. You 
have your disguise all ready. We’ll go ashore 
and fashion mine.” 

“Ba gar!” cried Drummond with a grimace, 
“Pm t’ink I’m done wit’ dose diable trappings, 
but she’s de good cause, an’ in de good cause I’m 
glad to wear dem leetle longaire. An’ you. 
Factor, I’m t’ink mebbe you pick wan off de 
lake!” 

He pointed straight down the north shore. 

“You see wan Iroquois Indian paddle in to 
Grande Portage dis afternoon? Ver’ well, dat’ 
de guide of de Montreal mail canoe. De 
courier send heem ahead de last few miles to re- 
port de mail cornin’. An’ I’m know she’s cornin’ 
soon, for yondaire’s paddles flashin’ lak loons’ 
wings off de Temple Rock.” 

The Hudson’s Bay brigade lay fairly in the sun 
glare streaming like a path of gold across the 
heaving lake swells. The sun itself was at their 
backs as they all stared in the indicated direction, 
and they could see without being readily seen. 

“By heavens, you’re right!” exclaimed Car- 
lisle. “It surely is the Montreal canoe. I take 
your hint, Drummond. It is as the courier I 
shall go in. Missowa” — commanding the Ojib- 
way steersman — “lie in the shelter of yon small 
island. We cannot be seen there, and there it 
does not matter to us whether the Northwester 
takes the inside or the outside passage. Eugene, 
fall in with the other craft behind.” 

At a spoken word from Missowa the port 


14 


AMBUSH 


paddlers dipped a strong forward stroke. The 
starboard paddlers hung with a back-water 
stroke as strong. The Factor’s craft swung in a 
choppy half-circle and slanted off for the lee 
of the island round the bouldered point where 
the big rollers broke in a white smother. Drum- 
mond, turning in behind with the six smaller 
canoes, greeted the motley crowd which filled 
them, four men to each craft, with a knowing grin. 

James Bay Crees the Indians were, together 
with Ojibways and an occasional Salteaux, all 
trusted post runners and trippers of the company 
and all personally known to the voyageur. 
Known likewise were the white men: Hampton, 
the younger son of an English squire; Jarvis, the 
street arab picked up from the pavements of 
London and in the service as a clerk; Wells, the 
country youth from a South-of-England shire; 
Garry and Lea, the two hardy Scots from Inver- 
ness and Cromarty; and the hardier Highlander 
Lewis from the savage Hebrides. 

Although Eugene had not seen any of them 
for nearly eight months he recognized every 
member of the brigade at a glance. Greatly his 
volatile nature longed to hail each by his fa- 
miliar name and pass with each a fitting and 
peculiar jest, but the Montreal canoe was ap- 
proaching and silence was the order from Carlisle. 

Not long had they to lie in ambush behind 
the concealing island. Presently arose a sound 
of water thrown from a pail upon the lake sur- 
face in spaced gushes — the splash of careless 
paddles. 


A CHANGE OF COURIERS 15 

“Line them out, Missowa!” Carlisle com- 
manded in a whisper. 

Like magic the eight canoes slipped from con- 
cealment and, bow to stern throughout the line, 
totally barred the channel passage which the 
Northwest courier was taking for smoother 
water. His two Iroquois canoe-men brought 
up the craft suddenly with bending paddle 
shafts and foaming blades, while the courier him- 
self, a swarthy-skinned Frenchman, half arose 
in amazement from amidships, either hand upon 
the gunwales. 

“I am Bertand, Northwest mail courier from 
Montreal,” he began in French, “and you 
are ?” 

“Of Hudson’s Bay, as you see,” smiled Car- 
lisle, answering him in his own tongue. 

“And you want ?” 

“Your letters, your clothes, and your canoe. 
The letters will go on safely to Grande Portage. 
Your clothes and canoe, the same or better, will 
be returned to you. Meanwhile, you rest quietly 
on shore here. Do you agree?” 

The courier’s eyes ran over the line, and he 
shrugged his shoulders in resignation. 

“But yes,” he agreed, “because I am no fool, 
especially in the face of superior numbers.” 

“Very well,” nodded Carlisle, and waved the 
Northwester’s Indian paddlers inshore. 

“Eugene,” he directed, “put on your shirt and 
cap and slip back as you came. It is best for us 
to go in separately, and besides, I leave it to you 
to get the Iroquois guide who arrived this after- 


16 


AMBUSH 


noon out of my way when I come. Do it any 
way you can, but be sure to get rid of him short 
of bludgeoning him. I’ll waste no time other 
than to arrive at a decent interval after you.” 

“And I, Eugene,” put in Father Andrews, 
abruptly, “shall drift in alone a little ahead of 
Paul.” 

Taken unawares, the voyageur exclaimed 
loudly in his French tongue and darted Andrews 
another of those sharp wondering looks with 
which he was wont to regard the priest. Par 
Dieu , here was that mystery again! What le 
c liable , he demanded of himself, did a priest want 
in mixing in such affairs? 

And even Carlisle regarded Andrews with 
grave astonishment. 

“You had better not risk it, Father,” he ad- 
vised. “You know there will be danger in the 
business.” 

“For you,” admitted Andrews, “but not for 
me! Why should the Northwesters bother their 
heads about a lone priest? Does my breed not 
watch at birth of Northwesters and Hudson’s 
Bay men alike, minister to their living needs alike 
and bury them alike at death? I shall surely go, 
for I have in mind what Eugene said about the 
£irl.” 


CHAPTER TWO 


GRANDE PORTAGE 

Dressed in the Montreal courier’s clothes, the 
cheap black cotton shirt, travel-soiled mackinaw, 
trousers, and cowhide moccasins, his face and 
hands stained with herbs to a swarthy shade and 
his head covered with a battered blue felt hat 
pulled well down over his eyes, Carlisle sat 
amidships in the courier’s canoe, the brown 
canvas, leather-bound mail-sack between his 
knees as the craft rounded the island which 
screened Grande Portage Bay. 

Their own brilliant and picturesque costumes 
discarded for the drab gear of the Iroquois 
canoe-men, Missowa the O jib way steersman and 
Waseyawin the Cree bowsman stoically paddled 
him in with their short, quick strokes. The 
canoe nosed into the channel, a mile and one 
quarter wide, and the wilderness post broke 
suddenly upon his vision. 

On his left hand lay the sheltering island with 
its rubble of great gnarled boulders littering the 
beach, its long, sloping point sheering up and its 
rampart of bush standing solid above. On his 
right spread the amphitheatre of the bay, a 
crescent sweep of shallow water, delicate green in 
colour and clear as air, edged by a low, flat shore 

17 


18 


AMBUSH 


which was backed in turn by terraced Laurentian 
hills. 

Tier upon tier they rose, the lowest three 
hundred feet in height, the highest more than one 
thousand, covered with crowding forest of birch 
and spruce and pine, thrusting out virgin arms 
to embrace the lesser island. 

Walling the back of the level shore land and 
curving westward into the lake rose a natural 
barrier, a forty-foot cliff of rock. Along the 
eastern side foamed a small stream, and hard by 
the stream the post buildings crouched in the 
clearing. Under the first hill tier they huddled, 
surrounded by cedar palisades eighteen feet in 
height. 

Tent villages and Indian cabins, spiraled with 
the smoke of many fires, dotted the eastern 
bank of the stream, while on the meadows and 
terraces farther back grazed cattle brought up 
the lakes in large boats or driven overland by 
wood trails from St. Paul on the Mississippi. 

Over the bouldered channel-bottom, distinctly 
seen through the intensely clear water, over the 
pebbled reach farther inshore Carlisle’s craft 
drove straight for a long canoe pier whereon he 
glimpsed many men at work loading or unloading 
canoes. As he approached he noted that the 
pier was built so as to form a canoe harbour. 
Fashioned of great square-timbered crib-work, 
spiked with iron, its foundation heavily stone- 
weighted to hold it in the bay, it was formed by 
two arms. 

The long western arm or shoreway streaked 


GRANDE PORTAGE 


19 


out from the curving sand beach into the bay, 
meeting at an angle the short eastern or harbour 
arm which extended but half-way back to land. 
Thus with only a narrow water gate for entrance 
was enclosed a canoe harbour which was safe for 
fragile craft in any storm. 

Though only a slight swell disturbed the 
channel outside, the harbour inside was calmer 
still. It lay like a mill-pond parting to Carlisle’s 
rippling bows as he passed the fur sloop Otter , 
lashed to the pier just outside the water, and the 
arm of the pier itself, his eyes following the curv- 
ing bilge of the sloop from water-line to keel and 
marking the bottom-most timbers of the crib 
work weed-grown in the clear green depths. 
Who had built the old pier he did not know, for 
here he touched upon ancient ground. 

Perhaps, he thought, it was the wanderer 
Dulhut who first of all established Grande Port- 
age post in 1670. Perhaps it was the later 
adventurer Lanove who rebuilt Dulhut’s post in 
1717. Or, again, it might have been any one of 
the swarm of French and Scotch traders who, 
after the fall of Quebec to the English in 1759, 
pushed their trading places along the Great 
Lakes to Detroit, Michillimackinac, the Sault, 
the Kaministiquia River, and finally to Grande 
Portage at the mouth of the Pigeon. 

Later, and before Carlisle was born, English 
traders foregathered there, and a score of fur 
lords competed, bickered, and fought finally to 
amalgamate into the Northwest Fur Company 
with the avowed intention of slowly but surely 


20 


AMBUSH 


sweeping the Hudson’s Bay Company from the 
continent. How well the Northwesters were 
succeeding in this his own generation Carlisle 
realized was known only to a few like himself who 
occupied high posts in the service, and his whole 
being thrilled at the trust imposed on this few by 
the older corporation when it commissioned them 
to throw down the gage of decisive battle. 

No ordinary routine incident was his transfer 
from Moose Factory to Cumberland House but 
the first move in a mighty struggle which could 
mean for his company only one of two things: 
conquest or cession. And how desperate must 
be that' struggle was borne in upon him by the 
plain truth that here at the very outset he was 
setting foot into a stronghold of his enemies al- 
most single-handed. 

Enemies! His gray eyes lightened with the 
anticipative gleam of conflict, but abruptly came 
remembrance of the courier role he had assumed, 
and he motioned his two pseudo Iroquois canoe- 
men to work him in against the crib. 

A pause in the toil and a shout from the toilers 
greeted him. All along the pier within reach of 
his hand were tied the big Rabiscaw freight 
canoes from Montreal, and the men who worked 
them through the Ottawa and French River 
and the lake route to Grande Portage were the 
ones unloading the cargoes they had brought: 
arms and ammunition: knives, axes, blankets; 
cottons from the looms of far Manchester, gaudy 
handkerchiefs of silk and cotton; rope and twine, 
fishing nets and lines; copper kettles and other 


GRANDE PORTAGE 


21 


cooking utensils; beads and mirrors; kegs of 
rum; carrot tobacco, twist tobacco; tea, flour, 
sugar — articles of food and trade in endless va- 
riety. 

And the men themselves Carlisle recognized 
as the giant Pork Eaters famed on the trail, 
French voyageurs off the Ottawa River and the 
parishes around, Iroquois Indians, Caughnawaga 
men, fierce, untamed. They yelled shrilly, the 
white men dancing joyously at the arrival of the 
mail, but Carlisle gave no answer other than to 
shake the pouch suggestively as his canoe glided 
close in at the end of the shoreway. There he 
leaped out and, his two canoemen stalking at his 
back, strode across the flat and in through the 
open gate of the palisade. Leaving Missowa 
and Waseyawin in the yard, he went on to the 
main warehouse where he knew he would find 
the post-keeper in charge. 

With his blood leaping in his body he stepped 
over the threshold, for he knew also whom he 
would see sitting there. If his disguise deceived 
David Thompson he was safe to go where he 
willed in Grande Portage. 

He had full confidence in his masquerade, but 
at the same time the knowledge that this was a 
critical test keyed him to severest tension, poised 
his physical being for a dash to escape if his 
confidence should not be instantly justified. He 
carried the mail-sack on his shoulder as he 
passed between the door-jambs, shooting a glance 
under the sack and his curved arm, seeking out 
the keeper. 


22 


AMBUSH 


At sight of a little office railed off from the 
general warehouse Carlisle’s fibres thrilled again, 
for behind it he beheld Thompson, as ever astron- 
omer and explorer rather than fur trader, poring 
over his maps and plans. 

At the swish of the courier’s moccasins he 
looked up. 

“Ha! Art here then,” he nodded, his Welsh 
origin betraying itself in his speech. “Tuh 
guide reported ’ee some hours ago. Put thy 
sack down there. Wilt make tuh entry.” 

As Thompson drew forward the journal of the 
post, Carlisle silently expelled a deep breath. 
Thompson had passed him! Thompson who 
for thirteen years had served in the Hudson’s 
Bay Company with him, who had lived the 
routine post life or taken the far trail with him. 
Thompson with whom he had built Manchester 
House and wintered among the Indians and 
sojourned at Samuel Hearne’s old post, Cumber- 
land House, which was now to be his own. 

Thompson with whom he had parted regret- 
fully when, on being ordered by Colen, Factor 
at York Factory, to do less surveying and get 
more trade returns! Thompson had left the 
service in a heat and gone over to the Northwest 
Company to undertake a journey of discovery 
that shamed Colen and all the Hudson’s Bay. 
How Carlisle envied him and his new company 
that feat — the survey west from Grande Portage 
to Lakes Winnipeg and Winnipegosis, south on 
the Assiniboine to the Souris, across the plains 
to the Mandan villages on the Missouri; thenee 


GRANDE PORTAGE 


23 


to the Assiniboine again, down to the Red River, 
across to the Mississippi’s headwaters, north- 
west to Duluth on Lake Superior, round Supe- 
rior’s shore-line to the Sault, and home once more 
to Grande Portage. 

Four thousand miles of virgin wilderness 
mapped in ten months and to be fur-farmed on 
the basis of the mapping by the Northwesters! 
The magnitude of it was astounding, the at- 
tendant loss to the Hudson’s Bay Company 
colossal. Holding his company’s honour as he 
held his own, it hurt Carlisle keenly to think that 
his former friend and the company’s former 
servant had been the cause. 

But of Carlisle’s state of feeling Thompson 
realized nothing. It was to his mind the Mon- 
treal mail-courier who stood before him, and he 
dipped his pen into the pot of brown ink. Carlisle, 
leaning sidewise against the grill, his elbow on the 
mail-pouch so that his big arm hid most of his 
face, waited with a renewal of his trepidation, 
the other entries of the journal, written in the 
fine, cramped hand he knew so well, dancing 
before his eyes. But in a moment Thompson 
finished recording the mail-courier’s arrival and 
closed the book. 

“Art free now,” he announced. “Thou wilt 
rest four days. Then ’ee wilt start back for 
Montreal.” 

Carlisle flopped his battered hat-brim in a nod 
of comprehension, swung on his moccasined 
heels, and passed out without a word to where 
Missowa and Waseyawin awaited him. 


24 


AMBUSH 


“ The order is to start back for Montreal in 
four days,” he informed them with a grim smile. 
“In the meantime, we are free to amuse our- 
selves.” 

“Good,” grunted Waseyawin in Cree. “It 
is well for us to have that knowledge if any man 
should ask.” 

“Yes,” nodded Carlisle, “and now we must 
get over the Portage as fast as we can. Have you 

seenEug Ha! Yonder’s his red shirt at the 

gateway. Come and we’ll see how things stand.” 

Carlisle and Drummond met casually outside 
the palisade, exchanging brief greetings and 
passing the news of the trail after the custom of 
Northmen meeting as strangers, then, still 
talking carelessly, strolled off up the path which 
led to Port Charlotte on the Pigeon’s bank. 

Not till they were completely out of sight of 
the post did they drop their careless pose, and 
not till then did the Cree and the O jib way, who 
had been loitering behind, presume to catch up 
with them. 

“What about the Iroquois guide?” Carlisle 
demanded, abruptly, of Drummond. 

“He be served wit’ extra rum for hees news of 
the mail cornin’, an’ I’m see dat he get leetle 
more w’en I come back,” chuckled Eugene. 
“ Mon Dieu — dancin’ drunk — ain’t trouble you!” 

“And Father Andrews?” 

“He be gone on ahead,” informed Eugene. 
“He ver’ mooch afraid you be delayed some- 
how at de post, an’ he t’ink in dat case it best 
for heem to go on to meet dem.” 


GRANDE PORTAGE 


25 


“Then let us hurry up and join him!” ex- 
claimed Carlisle, feverishly. “I want to be 
there when W ayne and his girl arrive. You lead 
off, Eugene.” 

With the woodsman’s lope, swift though easy, 
the lope that never tires, never varies, Drum- 
mond led off, Carlisle at his heels, the two 
Indians swaying lithely in the rear. The Por- 
tage was nine miles in all, and for the first half- 
dozen miles they climbed a stiff grade, dropping 
into hundred-foot gulches and clambering out 
again, fording small creeks or thumping over 
them on roughly timbered bridges, threading 
swampy beaver meadows on paths of corduroy. 

Then they topped the loftiest ridge whence 
the land rolled down in gentle convolutions to the 
brink of the river three miles away. Through 
the heart of a magnificent pinery, speckled here 
and there along the creeks with birch and poplar, 
Carlisle and his companions ran upon a trail the 
like of which was not to be found upon the 
continent. It was the connecting route between 
the Great Lakes and the vast West beyond. 

Below Port Charlotte the Pigeon River ran 
wild, plunging in great cascades, unnavigable by 
even the hardiest voyageurs. There was no fol- 
lowing it to its mouth, so brigades from the West 
unloaded here and packed over the nine-mile 
carry to Grande Portage on Superior’s open water. 

Every bale of fur gathered by the North- 
westers in that gigantic wilderness from Lake 
Superior on the east to the Pacific on the west, 
from the Mississippi’s headwaters on the south 


AMBUSH 


to the Arctic Ocean on the north, was freighted 
here by the Northmen’s canoes and carried across 
on their backs. Likewise all the supplies for 
that immensity of river, lake, forest, mountain, 
plain and barren, every pound of food and article 
of trade brought to Grande Portage by the 
habiscaw canoes of Montreal, went across in the 
opposite direction upon the same muscled backs. 

All along the rugged, twisting trail Carlisle 
and the others met or passed them in the act, 
huge Northmen from the Pays d’en Haut, Pork 
Eaters, Caughnawagas, and other Iroquois from 
the Ottawa, monstrously back-laden, working in 
the pack-straps in relays, setting down their 
burdens every thousand yards and breathing 
themselves as they retraced their steps for more. 

Packing for the glory of the packer and a 
Spanish dollar a hundred pounds, they sweated 
and toiled, coming and going, dotting the up- 
grade and the down and hiving thickly ’round the 
Port Charlotte landing where Carlisle and his 
three men came out on the river. 

“Ba gar, we be none too soon,” panted Drum- 
mond in a low voice. “Yondaire’s Ralph 
Wayne’s brigade.” 

He pointed toward the mid-current of the 
Pigeon, and Carlisle glimpsed half-a-dozen canoes 
swerving in for the landing. 

“And there’s Father Andrews close by the 
water’s edge!” exclaimed Carlisle. “Slow down 
to a walk and scatter out a little. And we’d 
better take packs as we go. Load up with any- 
thing handy and drop where I drop mine.” 


GRANDE PORTAGE 


27 


From the spot where the last relay had de- 
posited the loads bound westward over the 
Portage they took up bundles and sacks of 
provisions and, bent under them as if they were 
regular burden bearers, shuffled down through 
the crowd of Northwesters on the river bank. 
Carlisle dropped his pack directly behind the 
priest, and the others following suit, they all 
straightened up, stretching their arms in the air, 
pretending to breathe themselves as they idly 
watched the incoming brigade. 

“ We’re here. Father,” Carlisle whispered at 
Andrews’ back, “and so is the Free-Trader, I 
see. Are you going to tell him or shall I?” 

“I must, Paul,” returned Andrews in a voice of 
intense gravity. “It may seem strange to you, 
but neither Wayne nor his daughter must know 
your real name — yet. You may wonder, but I 
tell you in all faith it must be so. It is im- 
portant — more, it is vital to your interest and 
Wayne’s as well!” 

“I must be to him a courier? That is, for the 
present?” 

“Yes. You believe me when I say it is im- 
perative?” 

“Of course. Father. You know I have faith 
in your slightest word.” 

“All right, let me do the talking. The canoes 
are almost in.” 

The prow of the foremost craft all but 
grazed the landing, then swung broadside in to it 
under skilful paddle-strokes. From amidships 
a man of fifty-five or so, clad in buckskin gar- 


28 


AMBUSH 


ments unornamented except for the customary 
fringes, stepped cleanly out upon the shore. 
Carlisle, scrutinizing him eagerly, was struck by 
his great height. Although the Hudson’s Bay 
Factor himself stood fully six feet, this man 
topped him by four inches, and the impression of 
height was intensified by his lanky erectness. 

Clean-flanked, sloping-shouldered, long-armed, 
he seemed to poise in the air rather than to stand 
upon his battered moccasins. His head was 
bare, and from it the brown hair, luxuriant in 
spite of his advancing years, ran down in waves 
and curls almost to his shoulders. His face was 
darkened by exposure to a mahogany shade in 
which the only high lights that showed were the 
golden flash of odd-coloured eyes, eyes between 
a fawn and a green hue, and the sheen of the 
copper-coloured moustache which swept down in 
long, heavy curves over the grim mouth. 

Every inch a frontiersman, Carlisle sensed 
about him that greatness of spirit which in- 
effaceably clings to those who have dared the 
wilderness in all its immensity, all its ruthless- 
ness, all its cruelty, who have dared it and con- 
quered and inevitably in the conquering brought 
the depths of their natures to the surface. Even 
while Carlisle swiftly appraised him, he stooped 
with agility, one hand on the canoe gunwale, the 
other held toward his daughter to steady her as 
she disembarked. 

Out upon the landing she leaped beside him, 
and although her head scarcely reached to his 
shoulder Carlisle recognized in her swelling- 


GRANDE PORTAGE 


29 


hipped, full-bosomed figure the erect, agile, 
supple poise of her father. It showed in the 
curve and grace of her ankles and calves, encased 
in elk-skin moccasins and revealed by the short 
gray wool canoe skirt she wore. It showed, too, 
in the straight arms whose swell of forearm and 
upper arm but enhanced the direct line of her 
limbs. 

But her looks, he knew, she must have in- 
herited from her mother. For here was no skin 
of swarthy shade or mahogany tan. Fair as 
Northland snows was the face revealed as she 
threw back the veil of mosquito netting ’round 
her head. Indeed, so pallid shone her com- 
plexion in contrast with her father’s that it 
seemed to be wanly bleached, and her hair, 
yellow, wheaten, and spun-gold all in one — like 
the mingling hues of birchen leaves in autumn — 
seemed, against his brown hanging curls, to be 
likewise bleached. 

But Carlisle was aware that the art of bleach- 
ing did not extend north to latitude fifty-four, 
and besides, the glow and sheen of both skin and 
hair told that they were natural, as natural as 
the lake-blue laughing eyes or the spray of crim- 
son which tinged her cheeks at either side of the 
delicately chiselled nose. 

“Grande Portage at last, father!” she ex- 
claimed, laughing so that her red lips parted 
whimsically, poutingly, over splendid teeth. “It 
is good to get the canoe cramps out!” 

“Yes, Joan,” nodded her father, a smile 
cracking the grim mahogany of his face, “it’s 


30 


AMBUSH 


been a long day. But here’s a nine-mile walk to 
stretch your legs.” 

“You’ve come far then, I take it,” put in 
Father Andrews, rising from the bundle upon 
which he sat and extending his hand to the 
frontiersman. 

“From Fort Wayne on Sturgeon Lake,” re- 
plied the other, returning his grip. “I’m Ralph 
Wayne the Free-Trader, and this is my daughter 
Joan. We’re bound to Montreal. And you, I 
see by your netting, have followed the mosquito- 
pestered trail, too. Where are you bound. 
Father?” 

“But here,” responded the priest, turning his 
head to see that none of the Northwesters were in 
hearing and speaking in a lower voice. “I am 
Father Andrews, and I’ve come with a warning. 
Richelieu and his partners have closed the Port- 
age as private ground. They will seize you at 
the post. The partners want your trade, I 
understand, and Richelieu — well,” with a nod 
aside at Joan, “Richelieu wants something else.” 

Into the fawn-green eyes in the mahogany 
gloom of Wayne’s face blazed a light like the 
flare of lightning in a murky cloud. Instinctively 
his hand fell upon Joan’s arm in a protecting 
gesture, his tall frame straightened another inch, 
and his sweeping moustaches began to quiver as 
a precursor of violent speech. 

But Andrews was quick to forestall him. 

“Be careful,” the priest warned, hurriedly, “be 
very careful. These Northwesters all know 
what is going to happen to you, but don’t 


GRANDE PORTAGE 


31 


precipitate it by letting them know that you 
know. Is there any chance of your getting 
back up the Pigeon by a swift dash now? Are 
there any of their fleets afloat ?” 

“Two of their Winnipegosis brigades behind 
me,” rasped Wayne in a voice virulent with 
bitterness and rage. “If things are as you say, 
they’ll be notified, too. There’s no chance to 
pass them.” 

“Then there is nothing left to do but try for 
escape at the Superior end,” decided Andrews. 
“You won’t be able to count on your own men, 
since they’ll be watched or overpowered, but you 
may count on me and these four behind me: the 
courier, the voyageur, and the two Indians. 
Trust them as you would me!” 

“Thank God for your kindness and your warn- 
ing, Father!” breathed Wayne, turning in the 
middle of his words as if from some trivial con- 
versation loudly to order his men to lift the 
canoes and adjust the fur bales in tump lines for 
packing over to Grande Portage. “Thank God 
for it, I say, on account of my girl. If we can 
manage to get her safely through, for the rest I 
do not care.” 

“But I do, father,” declared Joan in a tremu- 
lous voice. “If I get through, you must, too. 
Otherwise I don’t want to.” 

And as the white men of Wayne’s brigade, men 
of the Mississippi, men of the Missouri, men of 
the Red — independent-spirited adventurers like 
himself — together with his Crees and Chippe- 
wayans, shuffled off under their burdens of 


32 


AMBUSH 


canoes and furs on the upgrade from Port 
Charlotte, the girl flashed a glance at the four 
whom Father Andrews had named as to be 
trusted. 

“Tell me,” she urged, intensely, with the pain- 
ful desire of one who will know the worst, “is 
there any real chance of getting through?” 

Her beseeching eyes went past Drummond, 
past Missowa and Waseyawin, as if the mag- 
netic personality of Carlisle, hidden though it 
was, drew them to himself, and for the first time 
since he had assumed the courier’s disguise the 
Factor silently cursed his masquerade. 

“By heavens, yes, a real chance,” he swore, 
fervently, “for rather than see harm come to 
you, I myself will sheathe a knife in Richelieu’s 
heart!” 


CHAPTER III 


AN INTERRUPTED BANQUET 

Carlisle and his men running empty-handed 
had loped over the Portage in a little better than 
an hour, but it was more than a two-hours’ walk 
back for the laden brigade, and the laggard 
summer dark came down as they neared the post. 
All the way across the two groups had kept well 
separated so as not to invite the notice or arouse 
the suspicions of the trooping Northwesters who 
at the end of their day’s work were flocking back 
to Grande Portage, and in the ordinary routine 
of superintending the packing, Ralph Wayne had 
managed to let each member of his brigade know 
what to expect. 

That no Northwester attempted to molest 
them yet or even speak to them further than to 
pass the customary greetings of the trail did not 
make them any easier in mind, for it was plain 
that throughout every mile of the nine they were 
unostentatiously kept under vigilance. One 
large body straggled ahead of them, one behind 
them upon the winding path, and when they 
reached the square of the palisades they became 
aware that there were crowds of men as a pre- 
ventive of flight between them and the open 
beach. 


33 


34 


AMBUSH 


Instinctively the two groups which policy had 
kept separate now united against a common 
menace. Carlisle gradually worked his way to 
the head of the line, close to Joan Wayne, while 
Eugene Drummond, Missowa, and Waseyawin 
glided silently at his back. Hard at their heels 
came the Free-Trader and the priest, themselves 
trailed by the thirty-odd brigade men bunching 
together under their packs of fur. 

As they passed into the stockade a ribald 
clamour greeted them, sounds of men singing and 
shouting and roaring with laughter, all sharply 
punctuated by the explosive popping of corks and 
the crash of a shattered wine-glass on hard 
boards. The babel rose from a big residence 
building which they w r ere skirting, and as Car- 
lisle, the girl, and the rest came into line with its 
row of open, lighted windows the brilliant scene 
within the dark-walled building flashed vividly 
upon their eyes. 

Under flaring hanging lamps ’round many 
feasting tables, spread up and down the long hall, 
were gathered together one hundred or more 
officers of the Northwest Company, interpreters, 
guides, clerks, wintering partners from the 
West meeting here the executive partners from 
the East, the most aggressive of the thirty-five 
lords of Beaver Hall. 

Among the rows of faces Carlisle glimpsed 
many known to him, MacGillivray and Sager 
from Fond du Lac, Todd from Fort des Prairies, 
James McKenzie, Grant, McTavish, and McLeod 
from English River and the Athabasca, McKay 


AN INTERRUPTED BANQUET 35 

from the Swamp Country, Roderick McKenzie 
and the rest of his cronies from Montreal, and 
lastly, Simon Richelieu, black-bearded of face, 
ramrod-like of figure, resplendent in the uni- 
form of a French colonel, reckless, voluble, ad- 
dressing half-a-dozen different persons at the 
same moment. 

There they sat noisily devouring such epi- 
curean marvels as bison’s hump, moose’s nose, 
beaver’s tail, wassailing in the finest Italian, 
French, and Spanish wines and flinging their 
souls out in laughter and song. But even as 
those outside gazed and passed the windows, the 
clamour stilled with strange abruptness. It was 
evident that a messenger had entered and 
spoken, that Wayne’s unostentatious warders 
upon the Portage had communicated with their 
roistering overlords. The company rose in a 
body and, Simon Richelieu in the lead, poured 
out upon the steps and sand terrace of the 
building. 

Richelieu stood upon the outer step, the lamp- 
light falling upon his gay uniform, laughing like 
a sardonic devil in his black beard and bowing 
his ramrod body from the hips. 

“Welcome, Ralph Wayne!” he chuckled. 
“Welcome, Mademoiselle Joan. The supper is 
ready. Mon Dieu , but I thought you were 
never coming!” 

“The devil!” exclaimed Wayne, startled in 
spite of forewarning. “ What does this pleasan- 
try mean?” 

“I’ll tell you,” spat Richelieu, the iron in him 


36 


AMBUSH 


showing up through his levity as he shoved his 
brutal, domineering face into Wayne’s. ‘‘I’ll 
tell you, Ralph. For several years we have 
tried to buy your trade, which you switch in 
secret to the Hudson’s Bay ” 

“You lie, Richelieu!” thundered Wayne. 

Richelieu, his face contorted, doubled up his 
arm as if to strike but with a glance at the girl 
thought better of it and flung out his open hand 
with a dramatic snap of the finger. 

“There! But I will have the Indian whippers 
whip that out of your hide in the post cellars to- 
night!” 

“No, no. Colonel,” cut in the voice of David 
Thompson who arrived suddenly out of nowhere 
and the dark, “wilt have no whipping in my 
post whilst I am keeper.” 

“del, Thompson, but your tongue is ready! 
If it were not that we need your map-making 
I would have you drafted for that.” 

“But I knows ’ee do need tuh maps,” nodded 
Thompson. “So wilst have no whippin’ in 
tuh cellars. Besides, would break tuh wine 
bottles.” 

“Well spoken, whatever, Davvy,” grinned 
James McKenzie, while the company roared and 
Richelieu, himself catching the contagion, re- 
laxed into laughter again at the public criticism 
of his own habits. 

“Thompson, for that thrust I forgive you, 
and Ralph Wayne escapes,” he chortled. “Are 
you not glad, Ralph? As I was saying, we need 
your trade, and so because it is easier to take you 


AN INTERRUPTED BANQUET 37 

here than at Fort Wayne we do so. Also be- 
cause Mademoiselle Joan would as usual flout me 
there I take her here where there is no flouting. 
Understand me? Hola — couriers, voyageurs, 
metis all — seize them!’ 

Instantly Carlisle’s arms were ’round Joan 
Wayne, making show of seizing her before any 
one else could touch her. And swift as he, 
Eugene Drummond, Missowa, and Waseyawin 
laid rough hands on Wayne and held him fast. 
Seeing the principles apparently in the grasp of 
their own men, the rest of the Northwesters 
pounced in a body upon Wayne’s laden brigade 
and before they could drop their canoes and 
packs their arms were gripped from either side 
by many hands. 

“Off to the cellars with the canoe-men,” or- 
dered Richelieu, and pushing, fighting, cursing, 
making vain efforts to break from the grip of so 
many hands, Wayne’s brigade swayed out into 
the dark. 

“Now, Ralph Wayne, come and eat supper 
with me, you and Mademoiselle Joan, and see if a 
full stomach and a bottle of good wine will make 
you change your mind. If you show sense, you 
may come back to my Sturgeon Lake post with 
Joan and me. If you do not show sense, you 
will go to join your men in the cellars while Joan 
goes back alone with me.” 

The moment he heard the words, Father 
Andrews pushed through the crowd past his 
friends, elbowing his way to the front. 

“Richelieu is half drunk,” he whispered to 


AMBUSH 


them as he went. “They are all half drunk — all 
but Thompson. Mark my speech and follow 
my move!” 

“ Mon Dieu /” exclaimed Richelieu, staring at 
Andrews in surprise. “Who is this? But wait. 
I remember now. You are the Jesuit missionary 
who asked a night’s shelter at the post.” He 
gave Andrews a friendly hand. “Donald Mc- 
Kay spoke of you this afternoon, but I did not 
catch the name.” 

“Andrews!” 

“Par Dieu, yes! I know more of that name 
than you think perhaps. How discourteous of 
me not to have inquired better. A famous name, 
Father, and a herald of deeds. I have heard of 
you for years. You go among the men of the 
rival Hudson’s Bay, too, eh?” 

“Chiefly to bury them,” answered Andrews, 
gravely. 

“Ho! Ho! You are a wit. Father. I had 
heard that. You must join us in the meal. You 
must sit at my table with Mademoiselle and 
her father. Comment? Was there anything 
else you wanted?” 

“I just wanted to ask about the maiden,” 
parleyed the priest, calmly turning to Joan 
Wayne. “It occurred to me that she may not 
be willing to have you carry her off like a buc- 
caneer to your Sturgeon Lake post.” 

“Ah! Mademoiselle is, Father, only she does 
not know that she is.” 

“I only know,” flashed Joan with a hate and 
passion in her voice that bit like flame, “that as 


AN INTERRUPTED BANQUET 39 

sure as you put out one finger to touch me, you 
will feel a knife in your heart.” 

But Richelieu roared in ridicule. 

“ Ciel , listen to that!” he pooh-poohed. 
“What a death from gentle hands! And, par 
Dieu, I believe it would be worth it. Would it 
not. Father Andrews? Name of a name, yes! 
I do not care to remember the number of months 
she has driven me crazy with her coy refusals and 
her floutings. And is she a mate to hide away 
or be ashamed of? 

“ Diable , just look at her there — just look! 
But come, my stomach’s hungering for my un- 
finished supper, and I can’t wait much longer. 
Come, Father, come all!” 

“ But it is not right for casual travellers to take 
up space at your tables to the exclusion of your 
own men who have worked hard all day,” de- 
murred Andrews to gain time. “Here are 
packers whom I see to be ravenous for their meal, 
and I who have cause to know something of 
hunger will keep no man waiting while I eat in 
his place.” 

“These do not eat with the officers,” Richelieu 
pointed out, “and they do not all eat at once. 
Neither is their fare what ours is, although at the 
same time it is good enough for them.” 

“For them?” echoed Andrews. “Are we all 
not dwellers in the wilderness together? And is 
one man not as good as another? Richelieu, I 
have heard of you, even as you have heard of me, 
and I know you are no niggard. Therefore I ask 
a favour. It is a special occasion, so let these 


40 


AMBUSH 


men eat at once with us and eat of the best you 
have. When strangers come, men keep an open 
board.” 

“ Mon Dieu , no, I am no niggard,” Richelieu 
boasted, pompously. “I grudge them nothing, 
Father, for they serve me well, and they shall 
have what you say and all that you say. Only, 
none of the Grande Portage buildings will hold 
one tenth of their number.” 

“True, yet the stockade ground here will hold 
them all,” suggested Andrews, craftily straining 
for the point he wished to gain. “And it is 
lighted like day with the canoemen’s fires on 
yonder beach. Have canoemen and all gather 
here to eat and let every man of your company 
see for himself how fair a mate sits at your 
table.” 

“del, but you have spoken it, Father!” cried 
Richelieu, swallowing the bait offered to his 
conceit, to his love of pomp and display. 
“Thompson, send out the word to the beach for 
them all to gather within the stockades. They 
can sit on the steps and the sand terrace, and I 
will have them served with food and wine where 
they sit.” 

Thompson himself strode out of the stockade 
ground and moved amid the mob across the 
level sand beach toward the shoreway of the long 
canoe pier. At his word the canoemen, leaving 
their fires with joyous whoops over their good 
fortune, surged up the beach and into the stock- 
ade ground. 

“Just when Richelieu turns to lead us in — 


AN INTERRUPTED BANQUET 41 

run for the sloop!” was all Andrews had op- 
portunity to whisper to Carlisle who, under 
Richelieu’s watchful eye, still had Joan by the 
arms. 

Carlisle passed the whisper to Eugene Drum- 
mond, Missowa, and Waseyawin who likewise had 
their hands upon the Free-Trader, and they 
all felt their tense nerves thrill vibrantly as the 
last of the mob of canoemen came in through the 
gateway. It required only a slight shifting of their 
gaze to mark the eastern crib work of the old canoe 
pier where the fur sloop Otter , empty after its run 
to the Falls of St. Mary, lightly rubbed its rail 
against the timbers. 

The harbour water within the angle of the 
pier and also the curve of the sand beach nearer 
at hand were lined with canoes. The beach it- 
self, starred with scores of campfires sending 
their crimson flares across the lake, was deserted 
as Andrews had schemed. 

Here, stamping on the sand terrace, climbing 
on the steps were the men who had peopled it, 
eleven hundred and twenty enrolled canoemen — 
thirty-six brigades — the total strength of the 
Northwest Company’s boatmen drawn from the 
world’s outposts and massed together in one 
spot, three hundred and fifty Rabiscaw paddlers 
of Montreal, in company with all the countless 
Indians of the district gathered for the yearly 
trade, the carousal, and the carnival. 

Never had Carlisle gazed on so weird and 
motley a horde of Northmen and Indians and 
nowhere else on the continent could Richelieu 


42 


AMBUSH 


have marshalled such a retinue. For these men 
Canada and the Atlantic States were only faint 
memories somewhere East. The Church for 
them was an impression fainter still. No man- 
made law had they ever seen forged farther than 
the Sault. 

They drew breath in an unclaimed land, and 
rum and bedlam rioted in their hearts. Only 
their fear of Richelieu postponed their songs and 
their brawls as they jostled up for their un- 
expected feast, and in the moment of their si- 
lence Richelieu raised his voice from the thresh- 
old of his dining hall. 

“Ho! Northmen from the Pays d’en Haut, 
and you Rabiscaw paddlers from Montreal,” he 
smirked. “ Voila ! Here is a priest with a kind 
heart, and on his thoughtful suggestion I ” 

The snoring surge of waters swiftly cloven, a 
triumphal yell out of the lakeward dark, the 
thump of a quickly wielded paddle upon a canoe 
gunwale interrupted Richelieu, and the next 
instant a lone birch-bark craft tore through the 
water-gate of the pier and spilled its single occu- 
pant upon the beach outside the stockade. 

“Who in the devil are you?” bellowed Riche- 
lieu, glaring truculently as the intruder bounded 
in through the open gateway and drove like a 
wedge up the jammed steps. 

“Bertand — Montreal mail-courier — waylaid — 
just escaped from the Hudson’s Bay men’s camp 
down the north shore,” panted the courier in 
French, his furtive eyes, filled with the stream- 
ing lamplight, scanning them over. “And 


AN INTERRUPTED BANQUET 43 

there,” levelling an excited finger at Carlisle, “is 
their Factor wearing my very clothes!” 

Carlisle, his left hand keeping its hold on the 
arm of Joan Wayne, launched his mighty body 
forward. His right foot shot into Bertand’s 
chest, his right fist into the black beard of 
Richelieu, and both men, catapulted back off the 
steps, went rolling down the sand terrace among 
the massed men. ^ 

Swift as he struck he wheeled with the girl, to 
find that his companions had been equally quick. 
As one man they had vaulted over the railing 
of the steps, sheer over the heads of the crowd 
sitting on the terrace beneath, knocking flat a 
dozen in the outer rank who stood directly in the 
way. 

Before they had fairly landed, Carlisle, gather- 
ing Joan in his arms, leaped after them. He 
alighted ankle-deep in the sand, plowing a furrow 
for yards in the loose, sugary grains, and without 
halting his impetus plunged for the opening in 
the stockade. 

With a yell of exultation his five comrades 
clanged it behind him and dropped the bar in 
place on the outside just as the roaring avalanche 
of Northmen brought up against it. Then like 
fleeing deer they were across the beach, out on 
the pier, and into the fur sloop Otter, Missowa and 
Waseyawin severing the hempen hawsers with 
their sheath knives, Drummond kicking loose 
the tiller, and Wayne and the priest running up 
the big mainsail with a jerk. 

The breeze had shifted at dark. It now blew 


44 


AMBUSH 


steadily from the south, snoring in through the 
channel, and like a live, palpitant thing the 
vessel responded to its urge. They could see 
Richelieu’s horde of Northmen climbing the 
eighteen-foot palisades and dropping to the 
ground outside, but before these could reach the 
water’s edge the mainsail tightened with a clatter 
of blocks, the boom uprose, and the Otter heeled 
over as she left the pier. 

Ashore reigned bedlam, pandemonium, all the 
vast motley crowd shuttling crazily in the light 
of scores of fires, shouting, explaining, command- 
ing and countermanding. Northwest officers 
were dashing out on the pier, yelling directions 
as they ran, McTavish, MacGillivray and Todd 
in the lead, and fragments of their shouts rang 
stridently on the ears of those in the boat upon 
the channel. 

“ — — , off in the sloop!” McTavish was roar- 
ing. “Launch the canoes and stop them!” 

“Condemned scoundrels, those four — ” it was 
the shrill declamation of Todd — “and the ras- 
cally priest as well!” 

And, loudest of all, the bull-moose call of 
MacGillivray demanding of his partner — 

“Sager, Sager, where in perdition are our Fond 
du Lac brigades?” 

Into the huge Rabiscaw canoes they were 
madly urging the crews, all clamouring at once 
and spurred by the curses of Richelieu who with 
the Montreal mail-courier, Bertand, was running 
here and there like a madman, his uniform all 
dirty and his black beard filled with sticky sand 


AN INTERRUPTED BANQUET 45 

as he spat forth French, English, Cree and 
Chippewayan in one breath. 

But the Rabiscaws, even though manned by 
twenty paddles, could not beat the wind. The 
Otter , already in midchannel, maintained her 
lead, rounded the island, and tore like a racing 
yacht down the rugged loom of the north shore. 

“Out of the desert into the mirage, as the 
Western saying goes!” breathed Joan, all her 
suspense and anxiety of the last few minutes 
finding an expression in a hysterical laugh. 

“Yes,” bantered Carlisle, “you were prisoners 
of the Northwesters. Now you are prisoners of 
the Hudson’s Bay — with every prospect of im- 
proved treatment. We’ll pick up my brigade 
at their camp down here and go on to the mouth 
of the Kaministiquia.” 

“So it’s not a courier I have to thank after all 
but a Factor,” she marvelled, whimsically. “ And 
your men were in the masquerade, too!” 

“As it happened,” he admitted. “Drum- 
mond, at the tiller yonder, gave us warning on 
the lake, and it all worked out as you saw. An- 
drews was a marvel.” 

“ He was that,” put in Wayne, warmly, “ not to 
speak of yourself. I am not the man to forget 
such a service. To what post do you belong? ” 

“Lately to Moose Factory but to Cumberland 
House when I reach there.” 

“The devil! The Factor to fight us, eh? 
And your name?” 

“Carlisle.” 

With an animal-like snarl Wayne let go the jib 


46 


AMBUSH 


halyard and snatched the sheath knife from the 
belt of Missowa by his side. His face under the 
weak starlight was a veritable blaze of ferocity, 
and his fawn-green eyes shone like the eyes of a 
lynx as he lunged at Carlisle with the long steel 
blade. 

“Stop, man, wait ! ” appealed Andrews, leaping 
as Wayne lunged. 

But quick as was the priest to spring, Joan was 
quicker. She launched herself between her 
father and Carlisle, her hands upon Wayne's 
striking arm, her whole weight bearing down 
upon it like a leaden clog. __ 

“Father, you are mad!” she shrieked. “He 
has just saved us from Richelieu. You’re for- 
getting the wilderness code. You can’t touch 
him.” 

For a moment they swayed thus in the 
careening sloop under the reeling stars, Carlisle 
grimly amazed, vaguely angered, poised for 
resistance, Wayne suddenly frozen still in his 
fury, moving nothing but his fawn-green eyes 
in continual shift from the Factor to the beseech- 
ing girl on his arm. Then the Free-Trader’s 
body relaxed with a sound like a groan as he 
allowed Joan to wrest the knife from his fingers 
and push him down to his seat. 

“No, you’re right, girl,” he mumbled. “It’s 
the code. I can’t touch him — yet!” 

Carlisle also sat down. 

“By heavens,” he sneered, sensing nothing 
but bitter trade antagonism, “I like your knife- 
edged gratitude ! ” 


AN INTERRUPTED BANQUET 


47 


But Eugene Drummond, replacing the long 
sweep he had unshipped to crash down upon the 
Free-Trader’s head from behind, sensed some- 
thing deeper. It was the (liable mystery he had 
always sensed! Here it was darker than ever. 
Andrews knew of it. Wayne knew of it. The 
Factor did not know. That was plain. 

Eugene shook his raven hair this way and that 
and swore darkly into the driving wind as he 
brought the Otter back on her course. 

For, mon Dieu , had he not seen enough to know 
that between the names Wayne and Carlisle 
there was hate or fear or wrong, blood-feud or 
crime or worse? 


CHAPTER FOUR 


AMBUSCADE 

Their weapons in their hands, the Hudson’s 
Bay men started up from their camp on the 
north shore as Drummond steered the Otter in, 
half-a-dozen hands let go the sheets and Carlisle 
himself sprang out into their midst. 

‘‘By a’ the wilderness gods, Factor, what’s 
happened noo?” cried Lewis. “Why are ye 
back? Who are yer prisoners? An’ what in 
the de’il are ye daein’ wi’ the Northwesters’ 
sloop? I kenned at first it was a drunken crew 
o’ the French Company led by yon slippery 
courier Bertand!” 

“I’m back, Lewis,” laughed Carlisle, “be- 
cause Richelieu and his partners are in too great 
force at Grande Portage and the Kaministiquia 
is the only other route into the West. These 
with me are Ralph Wayne, the Sturgeon Lake 
Free-Trader, and his daughter Joan who thought 
the Hudson’s Bay Company men better warders 
than the Northwesters. And we stole the sloop 
in order to escape. We’ll beach it somewhere up 
the Kaministiquia. I have to get into the Pays 
d’en Haut with all speed. Things have come to 
a head now on the Saskatchewan.” 

“Shades o’ Rupert, ye are sayin’ so, Factor?” 

48 


AMBUSCADE 49 

blurted Lewis, nodding to Wayne and doffing his 
Glengarry cap to Joan. “Tae a heid?” 

44 Yes, to a head,” repeated Carlisle, “and 
the quicker I am on the ground the better. Who 
let Bertand the courier away?” 

44 Yon hound o’ a Chippewa, Cotameg! Cota- 
meg was his warder, ye ken, an’ he dozed lang 
enough tae let the courier roll ower tae the mos- 
quito smudge an’ burn the thongs frae his wrists 
an’ ankles.” 

44 Fine him three months’ pay,” was Carlisle’s 
swift judgment. 44 If the like happens again, he 
leaves the service. Understand, Lewis? Now 
strike camp at once!” 

The Otter took them all aboard, men, dunnage, 
and canoes, and bore away for the mouth of 
the Kaministiquia River. Before daylight they 
made it, tacked about in the face of a strong head 
wind, and through the dark ran unseen past the 
sleeping Northwest post. On up the river they 
scudded till with the first streak of dawn the 
Otter grounded in rapid-broken shallows. 

Carlisle leaped out and caught his gear bag 
tossed from the hands of Drummond. 

“Eugene,” he ordered, “have the canoes 
loaded and all ready to go on while I get rid of 
these courier’s clothes.” 

He disappeared into a thicket up the shore and 
in a few minutes appeared again, the swarthy 
stain washed from his face and hands, the 
battered, blue felt hat, cheap cotton shirt, and 
trousers gone. He was his old self once more, 
clad in his cap of soft amber leather, rich blanket- 


50 


AMBUSH 


coat, deerskin knickerbockers, and high-cut moc- 
casins, and with the assumption of his own gar- 
ments he had immediately assumed the greater 
exclusiveness of his rank. 

Above all others in the brigade he loomed large 
on the conception, calm, self-reliant, determined, 
the reckless impulse of youth within him curbed 
by an ancient wisdom, his whole personality, 
manner, speech, invested with unostentatious 
dignity, surcharged with irrevocable authority. 

As he walked down to the shallows where Joan 
Wayne and her father awaited the preparations 
of the brigade, the girl gave an involuntary ex- 
clamation. She had expected some change in his 
appearance but not such a change as this. 

Great as was the difference between the status 
of courier and Factor, just so great was the dif- 
ference she saw, and the spray of red in her 
cheeks deepened and ran riot as she remembered 
the grip of his arms ’round her in Grande Port- 
age and the ring of his voice as he swore he would 
save her from Richelieu. 

But her father at her side was in no such 
pleasant attitude of mind. Joan, glancing at 
him, saw his face working with an emotion that 
was nothing less than terrible. 

“Charlie Carlisle!” he was reiterating in a low, 
snarling tone. “ Charlie Carlisle all over again ! ” 

“Paul Carlisle, father!” corrected Joan, lay- 
ing a hand on his arm to quiet him. “Paul, I 
heard Father Andrews call him. Be calm, won’t 
you? He’s our enemy in trade only, and why 
should you make it such a bitter personal hate?” 


AMBUSCADE 


51 


“ You don’t know what you are talking about, 
girl,” growled Wayne, “you don’t know. By 
the Doom — the image of his father before him!” 

Wayne’s hand went to his waist, clutching 
for the weapon that was not there. As his 
fingers fumbled helplessly, he seemed to re- 
member his present plight and with a curse 
abruptly turned his back. 

“All ready, Eugene?” called Carlisle, cheer- 
fully. 

“Owi, Factor,” assured Drummond, sweeping 
an expressive hand over the fleet. “All ready 
for start. I be got to double oop two crews in 
dese canoes on account dose crafts Fadder 
Andrews an’ Bertand left on Grande Portage.” 

With Garry as steersman, Eugene himself had 
taken charge of one of these canoes, the second in 
the line, where from its bow he could command 
the whole brigade, and the fact that in so short 
a time every bit of dunnage was trimmed for 
balance, every paddler in his proper position, 
bespoke his keen efficiency. 

Behind him, one in charge of each separate 
craft, were the three white men, Lewis, Hampton, 
and Lea. Ahead of him floated the splendid six- 
fathom canoe of the Factor, lipping a flat rock 
in the shallows, waiting for its owner, its crimson 
flag and gonfalon crackling as before, the gay 
woollen streamers blowing from the paddle shafts, 
and the paddlers themselves poised in their 
bright costumes of gaily-decorated moccasins, 
leggings, sashes, fillets, and plumes. 

And gayest of all posed Waseyawin and 


52 


AMBUSH 


Missowa, standing in the high, curved bow and 
stern, their common disguises thrown aside to 
let the wilderness world know their rank as 
bowsman and steersman. 

Carlisle’s eye glistened with pride as he 
glanced them over, but with only a momentary 
dwelling his gaze passed on to Wayne and his 
daughter. 

“Now it comes to your decision.” He spoke 
bluntly yet in the spirit of earnest friendliness. 
“I can double up another crew and spare you a 
canoe to go on to Montreal as you intended. 
You may walk down the bank to the Kaministi- 
quia post. Or you may come back with me to 
Cumberland House. In the first two cases you 
go freely. In the third case you will be in cus- 
tody.” 

Wayne’s eyes held Carlisle’s with a blazing 
gleam. His whole intense being seemed to leap 
out in that bitter gaze, leaving his lips no 
mission in speech, and it was Joan, tremulous 
and fearful of his wrath, who hastily answered 
for him. 

“There is no use in our going on to Montreal,” 
she pointed out. “The furs are gone — a sixty- 
thousand-dollar cargo. Besides, neither I nor 
my father wants to risk going into Northwest 
headquarters after what happened at Grande 
Portage. You know that.” 

“Yes, I judged so,” nodded Carlisle. “Then 
it’s the Kaministiquia post or Cumberland 
House. And I hope it’s Cumberland House. 
You see, white women are so scarce in this land 


AMBUSCADE 


53 


that a man does not meet and part with them 
lightly. Good heavens! I spent four years in 
London, and there was a woman there for every 
square rod of the city. 

“I’ve lived seventeen years in wilderness posts, 
and in all that time seen very few. Do you 
understand? It’s made me appreciate them 
wonderfully, and somehow, now when I look at 
you, I’m — I’m — well, frankly, I’m glad that I’ve 
seen but few!” 

Joan flushed at his patent warmth. 

“But it’s for my father to say,” she evaded in 
confusion. 

“It’s Cumberland House,” cut in Wayne, 
suddenly finding speech and taking Carlisle’s 
option as if he had heard nothing that intervened. 
“Condemnation! Why should we rot in the 
Kaministiquia post? We will go back to our 
own district, Joan, the district they would wrest 
from us, and there, by the Doom, they’ll see who 
does the wresting!” 

“You’ll give parole?” asked the Factor, 
ignoring the threat. 

“No,” thundered Wayne. “Put a guard on 
us and keep us if you can!” 

“Very well,” nodded Carlisle, grimly, “my 
eyes will be guard enough.” 

He took a step aside to where Father Andrews 
waited silently on the bank. 

“A strange, violent man, Father — yes, and 
bitter as gall against the Hudson’s Bay!” he 
whispered. “If it were not for the girl’s sake, 
I would give him back some of his own medicine. 


54 


AMBUSH 


She interests me greatly. So will you pair amid- 
ships with Wayne, then? The girl and I will sit 
behind you.” 

“As you like, Paul,” agreed the priest, taking 
the indicated place. “I am glad you have your 
temper under control. There is no gain in 
letting it slip.” 

Carlisle gave Joan his hand as she stepped 
in, but when he motioned the Free-Trader to 
follow, the latter drew back defiantly. 

“I ride in the next,” he growled. “I will not 
ride with you. Though you’ve put me under 
the code, my hands still itch for the Ojibways’ 
knives.” 

“All right, if you feel like that,” assented the 
Factor. 

He waved Wayne aboard Drummond’s craft. 

“Eugene,” he enjoined, “he is under your 
eye!” 

Then he stepped into his own canoe, meeting 
with a good-humoured laugh Joan’s deprecatory 
face. Rendered ashamed, as well as alarmed, by 
her father’s fresh defiance, she had remained 
standing, perturbed, uncertain as to the outcome 
of the verbal clash. Now, quite naturally, they 
sat down together upon the rich ermine robe, 
and the brigade shot up the Kaministiquia. 

In the wake of La Verendrye, whose prow had 
first cut these waters in 1731, they went, and as 
the silence of the forest enveloped them Eugene 
Drummond’s clear tenor struck up an air to time 
the paddles of his canoemen. 

All day and half the night the fleet wound up 


AMBUSCADE 


55 


the rock-walled, spruce-hedged Kaministiquia to 
its source. Lake Shebandowan, across golden 
Shebandowan, over jewelled Lake Kashaboyes 
toward the range of granite which hurled the 
Western waters back to Winnipeg. 

The setting sun did not drop behind the gray 
crags of the range till nine in the evening, and 
then the orange-rose afterglow burned its witch- 
light for an hour more. But abruptly as the 
orange-rose turned saffron stalked the jealous 
dark, and night and the brigade camped to- 
gether upon the crest of the Superior Divide. 

At morning they left the Height of Land be- 
hind them, and like the flash of their paddles the 
days went by as they plunged down the western 
slope of the watershed through Lac des Mille 
Isles, the Seine River, Rainy Lake, Rainy River, 
and Lake of the Woods. All the way by paddle, 
pole, and portage Eugene Drummond pitched the 
canoe song for his gay-souled voyageurs. 

Ralph Wayne’s glowering hate grew darker 
as he hit upon no opportunity to escape, and the 
strangely begun intimacy between Joan and 
Carlisle blossomed and thrived at a pace that set 
her father to brooding. Stately figures upon the 
vast tapestry of forest verdure they passed with 
no untoward incident until after leaving Lake of 
the Woods. 

Then as they rounded a bend of the Winnipeg 
River some miles above Lac du Bonnet, Wase- 
yawin uttered a cry of warning from the bow of 
the Factor’s flying canoe. Instantly Missowa 
and the middlemen caught it. Their blades 


56 


AMBUSH 


back-watered with a gurgling roar, and the prow 
of the craft brought up within ten feet of a chaos 
of dead tamarack _ trunks which choked the 
stream. 

“A windfall, eh?” cried Father Andrews. 
“That was a close thing, Paul.” 

“No — no windfall!” declared Carlisle, stand- 
ing up to see better. “Look at the axe marks on 
the butts. It’s a barricade. Missowa, Wase- 
yawin — back! Back, Drummond — quick!” 

But hard on his words and before the brigade 
had time to swing about came the chug-chug of 
axes behind them. A score of dead birches 
swayed out from the bushy margin and crashed 
into the river in an impassable tangle of crossed 
trunks and interwoven branches. And out 
upon the barricades before and behind poured 
more than one hundred Northwesters, the chop- 
pers with their bright-bladed axes still in hand, 
the others with long-barrelled rifles trained on the 
Hudson’s Bay brigade. 

Carlisle recognized on the instant James and 
Roderick McKenzie, McLeod and McDougall 
with their returning Athabasca brigades, and 
Richelieu with his Sturgeon Lake brigade, all 
apparently bound into the Pays d’en Haut. 

“ Mon Dieu 9 Carlisle, but I have you trapped 
now!” roared Richelieu. “You and Ralph 
Wayne and mademoiselle and your renegade 
priest!” 

“Yes, Carlisle,” guffawed Roderick McKenzie. 
“I had thought you too good a woodsman to 
put your head into a deadfall like that. ” 


AMBUSCADE 


57 


“Never mind your tongue play, you two,” the 
impetuous McLeod cut in on them. “Take 
these men prisoners, lift their arms, clear yon 
barricade, and let’s be on our way!” 

“In my own good time, McLeod,” bullied 
Richelieu. “Neither you nor any other man 
can hurry me. You see, Carlisle, you’ve* tried 
the patience of McLeod and the others. The 
Pigeon River route into the Lake of the Woods 
is faster than the Kaministiquia route and, par 
Dieu, we’ve waited for you here longer than 
we’ve liked. Comprenez-vous? Do you sur- 
render quietly?” 

Carlisle, sweating in the sun-heat off the river 
which seemed suddenly to have grown more 
intense, cast swift, calculating glances to right, to 
left, and behind. 

“Surrender?” he echoed, trying to gain time 
by parleying and all the while seeking for some 
means of apparently impossible escape. “What 
under heaven do you Northwesters set your- 
selves up to be? Even though your claim to 
Grande Portage holds good — and I tell you 
bluntly that it doesn’t — this is not Grande 
Portage. This is the Winnipeg — the West, and 
I want to ask you by what right you stop any 
traveller on Winnipeg waters?” 

“By the right of might, m’sieu ’,” answered 
Richelieu, insolently. “We have our secret 
service also, and we know your mission into the 
Saskatchewan, del, do you think I am fool 
enough to let you go on to Sturgeon Lake when 
I have the chance to cut you off here? It was 


58 


AMBUSH 


my plan to take you at Grande Portage, but 
there was a slip. I lost track of you for a little — 
until the courier Bertand exposed you. 

“ Diable , I have not forgotten your mas- 
querade, nor the blow you gave me. For every- 
thing you will answer toute suite , Carlisle — oui 9 
and mademoiselle will come back where she be- 
longs. 5 ’ 

Through every word of Richelieu’s tirade 
Carlisle felt his face fairly crisping with the in- 
creasing heat. He put his feeling down to the 
well-nigh unbearable suspense of the moment 
and to the fact that they lay motionless upon the 
sun-refracting water in windless air held stagnant 
by the forested shores. But as Richelieu finished 
his bold prophecy, a sharp tang, permeating the 
heat wave, stung Carlisle’s sensitive nostrils. 

“ Smoke ! ” he exclaimed, hoarsely, to the others 
in the canoe. “Is that another trick of these 
curs?” 

McDougall, up on the loftiest log of the 
barricade, caught the tang at the same moment. 
He whirled suddenly to face down stream. 

“Holy Dog-Ribs,” he shouted. “Look — 

Richelieu, look! The whole forest’s on fire!” 

McDougall pointed aghast where, not more 
than five hundred yards away, as far ’round the 
river bend as he could see, a black pall rolled up 
above the tamarack tops along both banks and 
shooting flames darted like red, horned devils be- 
tween the dark trunks. 

“ Diablement,” Richelieu swore. “Some of 
your careless whelps have dropped match or 


AMBUSCADE 


59 


pipe, McDougall! Run, everybody, run! In 
canoes and up stream ! And, mon Dieu , paddle 
for your cursed lives!” 

He himself led the route before the charging 
flames, plunging headlong from the barricade 
into the thicket of green where they had hidden 
their canoes when they arranged the ambuscade. 
Like madmen the hundred of them ripped and 
tore through the growth, bending, chopping, 
trampling down obstructing saplings and shov- 
ing their crafts afloat above the upper barri- 
cade. 

“Name of a name, come on! ” yelled Richelieu, 
as the paddles foamed away. “Carlisle — 

Wayne — Joan chere — all you there, hola ! Fol- 
low us. It’s your only chance.” 

“What do you think, Drummond?” snapped 
Carlisle, feverishly. “Follow and be captured 
or try to run through the fire?” 

“Ba gar,” breathed his brigade leader, “she’s 
so hot I’m t’ink we burn to cinder. Still de 
smoke she seem to start close. Mabbe I be take 
wan look an’ see. If de rivaire be smokin’ for 
miles we nevaire do it. If she’s shallow fire 
mebbe we make de dash.” 

In an attempt to gage the depth of the con- 
flagration Eugene leaped out upon the barricade, 
but as he thrust a bronzed face over the topmost 
trunk, another face was thrust into his from the 
other side, a brown-bearded, long-jawed plains- 
man’s face, weather wrinkled and alkali seared, 
the yellowed teeth jarred apart in a triumphant 
grin. 


60 


AMBUSH 


“Mason !” exclaimed Joan Wayne in an odd, 
high-pitched tone. 

“By the Doom — yes. Mason !” echoed her 
father. 

And Carlisle, Drummond, Andrews, Missowa, 
and Waseyawin suddenly remembered him, one 
of the Missouri men, Wayne’s brigade leader, 
whom they had last seen in the grip of the 
Northwesters as they dragged him and his com- 
panions off to the cellars of Grande Portage. 

“Come on,” implored Mason, frantically. 
“My pardners fired her back a bit to skeer them 
cusses off. ’Twas the only sartin way we seen. 
Come on. Ye kin run through her ! ” 

The Missourian had an axe in his hand, and 
even while he implored he brought it into play 
upon the up-thrusting branches of the barricad- 
ing trees, slashing a three-foot passageway down 
to the water level. 

There was neither time nor need to cut the 
floating trunks. At a command from Carlisle 
the whole brigade swarmed out upon them, the 
six canoes were whipped from the water, passed 
through the gap, and launched on the other side. 

“All aboard!” shouted Carlisle. “Now — wet 
blankets on your heads and paddle like very 
demons!” 

He swiftly set the example, soaking a blanket 
overside and drawing it as a protecting canopy 
over the girl, the priest, and himself. 

“That’s the trick!” approved Mason who 
had tumbled in beside Wayne in Drummond’s 
canoe. “ ’Twould be a tumble sin to scorch yon 


AMBUSCADE 


61 


ha-ar of Joan’s. It’s a short run, boys, but hot 
as Hades!” 

Flying down stream into the face of the flame, 
the heat struck them with magnified force, like a 
searing furnace blast. Either bank was a mov- 
ing wall of fire, sputtering and shrieking in a 
medley of impish voices: flare of dry leaves, 
crackle of underbrush, sizzle of green pine- 
needles, pop of resinous knots, crash of half- 
consumed stubs and the patter, plop, and hiss 
of embers ceaselessly raining upon shore rocks 
and river surface. 

And all these lesser voices blended as separate 
notes into a symphony of vast volume, of awe- 
some power, the Gargantuan roar of the fire 
giant bellowing a thunderous diapason. 

Carlisle felt the blanket on his head grow warm 
and commence to steam. He breathed in gasps 
in the stifling heat and smoke, the blood pound- 
ing so hard in his head as to make him dizzy. He 
wondered if Joan would faint in that inferno, and 
he blindly put out his hand toward her to re- 
assure himself. His fingers touched and closed 
on hers, burning fever-hot beneath the blanket 
folds. 

“A moment more and we’ll be through, Joan,” 
he cheered. 

Joan had one hand covering her mouth as an 
additional safeguard against the smoke, but her 
fingers tightened on his in answer, and the grip 
sent a fierce thrill through his frame. 

“The deil!” boomed the cavernous voice of 
Lewis somewhere behind. “ W e’re gaein’ doon ! ” . 


62 


AMBUSH 


At the cry Carlisle threw back a corner of the 
blanket in time to see Lewis’ canoe disappear 
suddenly, leaving its four occupants swimming 
with the current. The terrific heat had melted 
the pitch on the birch-bark seams, letting in the 
water as into a sieve. 

“Gae on,” Lewis urged. “Dinna stop for us. 
It’s muckle cooler swimmin’.” 

Before the man of the Hebrides and his 
Indians had taken a dozen strokes in the water, 
down went Hampton’s canoe, and twelve heads 
now dotted the river surface, diving, reappearing, 
and diving again to escape the blistering breath 
of the flames. Lea’s craft, waterlogged and 
careening, promised to follow suit, but Drum- 
mond’s heavily laden canoe still flew like an 
arrow, and the Factor’s canoe ahead, likewise 
heavily laden so that its seams lay mainly under 
water, traveled as yet unharmed. 

Flying canoes and racing fireline were meeting 
at tremendous speed, but as if the fireline were 
standing still, the faster creatures of the forest 
broke from cover and passed the whizzing canoes. 
Like scurrying autumnal leaves the lesser birds 
flew through the rolling smoke pall. 

Wedges of geese and ducks drove by on 
whistling wings. Coveys of partridges flushed 
with a drum-like roaring. Palpitant hares 
spurned the ground in fear-mad leaps. Squirrels 
chattering, demented, hurled themselves across 
the latticework of branches. The lordly caribou, 
antlers back and noses outstretched, crashed up 
stream like bombshells through the forest growth. 


AMBUSCADE 


6 $ 


Amid a demoniacal tumult of earth and air 
they struck the fireline. A mass of blazing 
limbs whirled down and lodged on the bow of the 
Factor’s canoe. Like tinder the dry birch-bark 
flared up, but Waseyawin, bare-handed, cast 
the burning debris off and with a scoop of his 
paddle dashed a gallon of water on the flaring 
bow. 

The blaze sputtered out with a malignant hiss. 
The Cree dug in his blade, and the next moment 
the craft leaped out of the seething inferno into a 
strangely quiet reach of stream where the 
smoking, ash-filmed ground lay white as snow 
and the blackened trees slid by like spectres 
winking red-hot eyes at every puff of wind. 


CHAPTER FIVE 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 

“Joan, are you burned at all?” demanded 
Carlisle, throwing the half -charred blanket aside. 
“ Scorched even ? Hair — f ace — hands ? ’ ’ 

The girl drew the sweet, smokeless air into her 
lungs with a gasp. 

“No, Paul, no,” she assured him. “The 
flames never touched me. Are you all right — 
and my father and Father Andrews and the 
rest?” 

“All safe, apparently! There’ll be singed 
heads and blistered skins for a while, but every- 
body’s come through fine.” 

“Aye,” murmured Father Andrews, “they 
have — by the grace of God.” 

“And Mason,” supplemented Wayne from 
Drummond’s canoe behind. 

“By Jove, yes, by grace of Mason, too!” 
Carlisle lauded. “If it hadn’t been for Mason 
we might not have tried to run the gaunt- 
let.” 

“That’s what I was thar fer, to give ye the 
word,” grinned Mason. “Ye see, they had a 
eelebrashun fer the McKenzies, McLeod, Mc- 
Dougall, and Richelieu when they left Grande 
Portage fer the Athabasky. Everybody got 

64 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 65 

roarin’ drunk, and somebody left the bar off the 
door of our cellar. 

“Thompson dropped a word about ye gittin* 
away, Wayne, with Hudson’s Bay men bound 
into the Saskatchewan, so on course we got out of 
the cellar at dark and stole canoes, rifles, and 
grub to last and follered them drunk cusses up 
the Pigeon. W e figgered yer party’d come in by 
the Kaministiquia, and we soon seen Richelieu 
figgered so, too. They travelled like hell-fire, 
aimin’ to head ye off and git to the Winnipeg 
River first. 

“They done it all right and barricaded her and 
lay by fer two days, and when they bushwhacked 
ye jist now we had to chase them with fire. She’ll 
heel them miles back to the Pechilaux and Red 
Sand rivers cornin’ in on either bank. She’ll 
stop thar, I calkilate. Hullo! Thar’s my men 
on the shore. Time, too, fer this cussed canoe’s 
goin’ down.” 

Lea’s craft had already gone. Drummond’s 
settled by the river margin amid all the swimmers 
from the other crafts, and all pulled themselves 
out dripping upon the ashy shore where waited 
Wayne’s men of the Mississippi, men of the 
Missouri, men of the Red, along with his Stony 
Crees and Chippewayans. 

Wayne stamped the water off as he made his 
way along the bank to the Factor’s canoe, still 
sound and strong, where it lay grazing the river 
rocks. 

“Well,” he laughed, grimly, his fawn-green 
eyes glowing into Carlisle’s where the latter sat 


66 


AMBUSH 


amidships, “fire is always a man’s friend if it’s 
properly used, and I guess it’s my friend right 
here.” 

“You mean ” 

“Of course I mean that. I’m the Big Chief 
now, and it’s my turn to powwow. Your crew 
of six have their arms left. The arms of all the 
other crews are at the Winnipeg’s bottom. You 
can’t stand up against my thirty-two armed men. 
So tell your paddlers to step out with their hands 
up!” 

“Wik! Wik!” Carlisle yelled, sharply, to 
his crew. 

Swift as lightning they dipped their paddles 
in a terrific drive. The great canoe leaped its 
own length like a spurred horse and sheered off 
into mid-river. 

“Stop!” Wayne bellowed. “Rapide des 
Boisfranc’s just below. You can’t run it. It’s 
never been run. By the Doom, before you’ll 
drown my girl I’ll ” 

He broke off to snatch a rifle from the hands of 
the nearest man and level it at the canoe. 

“ Carlisle — stop ! Stop, or I’ll shoot you like a 
skunk!” 

But at the menace of the rifle muzzle Joan, 
sitting on Carlisle’s left hand, sprang up as a 
shield between. 

“Father, don’t fire,” she implored. “You for- 
get — you forget!” 

“I forget nothing. Sit down, girl — sit down, 
Isay.” 

Joan did not sit down, but a lurch of the canoe 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 67 

in the eddies set her swaying so that Carlisle 
pulled her down. The action put their bodies 
out of line where they sat, and instantly Wayne’s 
rifle cracked. Carlisle heard the rip of the 
puncturing ball through the canoe from side to 
side above the waterline, and at the same mo- 
ment he felt a solid blow, like the thud of a stone, 
on his left leg below the knee. 

Blankly surprised, he looked down, to see 
the calf of his high-cut deerskin moccasin 
punctured from side to side as neatly as the birch- 
bark skin of the canoe. Blood was spreading 
over his leg and trickling down the creamy deer- 
skin to his ankle. Hastily he thrust the wounded 
limb under a dunnage bag before Joan should see. 

Missowa twisted the stern and flung the craft 
cleanly across the river bend so that a rock 
shoulder intercepted Wayne’s line of fire. They 
were round the bend, swinging into the grip of the 
powerful, tugging current writhing down to 
Rapide des Boisfranc. 

Wayne’s Free-Traders had hidden their own 
canoes in the forest below the rapid, ready for 
hasty flight when they crept up the shore to spoil 
Richelieu’s ambuscade. Now those in the racing 
Factor’s canoe could hear them clamouring as 
they crashed along over the mile portage in a 
vain attempt to overtake the craft before it 
could reach white water. 

“Oh, my father shouldn’t have fired that 
way,” censured Joan, still unaware of Carlisle’s 
wound, “for he might have killed you, Paul! 
He’s not himself. I swear he’s not himself. 


68 


AMBUSH 


He’s mad with an enmity I’ve never seen him 
hold before — with a hate that’s quite beyond 
me!” 

“I know,” nodded Carlisle, turning a grimace 
of pain into a smile, “and you see how im- 
possible it was for me to let myself be taken 
prisoner. I’m sorry, Joan, to have to hurl you 
through these infernal rapids, but it can’t be 
helped now. We can’t stop to land you. You’ll 
have to hold on tightly and keep your weight as 
low as possible. Now, take your grip. Yonder’s 
white water ahead!” 

With terrific speed they were shooting down 
the black, ominous surges at the head of the 
rapids, surges twisting and writhing like a brood 
of mighty pythons between the crowding walls 
of rock. Fast as the river ran, the craft was 
running faster, flung bodily ahead of the mad 
current by the desperate paddles of Waseyawin, 
Missowa, and the four middlemen. 

Not for an instant might they allow the river’s 
velocity to approximate the canoe’s velocity, 
because in that instant control would be lost to 
their blades and disaster ensue. 

Half-a-dozen canoe lengths from the foaming 
snarl of white water the bowsman, W aseyawin, 
gave a high-pitched yell as a signal. At his cry 
the tremendous speed of the paddle-strokes ab- 
ruptly doubled till it seemed some deep magic 
and not the skill of men which plied blades that 
the quick eye could scarcely follow. 

The canoe was fairly torn from the suck of the 
dark water and launched like a meteor through 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 


69 


the white. Waseyawin gave another yell. As 
one man the four middlemen shipped paddles, 
leaving Waseyawin and Missowa, standing at 
bow and stern, to twist the huge craft this way or 
that. 

Waseyawin, eyes focused on the moil below, 
read the river as white men read a book, and ever 
his high-pitched yells split the tumult of the 
waters, drifting back to Missowa in the stern, 
telegraphing him what lay ahead — tossing billow, 

! seething white water, angry eddy, treacherous 
cross current, fountained spray that marked the 
jagged rock, or shallow foam that masked the 
sunken boulder. 

Through a mistof flying drops they rocked over 
the edge of the cascade proper and plunged sheer 
down a milk-white chute as steep as a flight of 
stairs. 

Nerved as she was by her father’s training 
against all Northland menaces, Joan felt her 
spirit quaking at the sickening drop. Nausea 
dulled her senses. Terror gripped her heart. 
She shrank from the roaring, brutal maw of the 
river, shrank from its slaver and fangs, pressing 
tremblingly closer and closer to Carlisle. 

“My God — my God,” she quavered as they 
struck the base swells of the cascade with a tear- 
ing sound like the ripping of a thousand yards of 
silk, “are we gone, Paul?” 

“No, Joan, we’re all right,” Carlisle soothed. 
“We’ll go through. If I hadn’t full faith in my 
Indians, do you think I would have risked it 
with you?” 


70 


AMBUSH 


He loosened his grip and like a child he drew 
her shrinking body into the hollow of his arms. 

“I wouldn’t have risked it, Joan,” he declared. 
“I haven’t found you that long to lose you so 
soon. Don’t you understand, girl? Can’t you 
realize what finding you back there at Grande 
Portage has meant to me?” 

The frightened face upturned to his, the face 
blanched of its customary colour, lost the rigidity 
of terror, grew mellow, warm, sprayed with its 
crimson again, and her eyes deepened under some 
potent emotion to an amethyst shade. In the 
grip of the colossal elemental forces, heaving 
through a boiling caldron on the edge of death, 
her feminine finesse that under other circum- 
stances would have kept him at bay, tantalized, 
in doubt, was torn away and to her lips of no 
denial Carlisle, on wild impulse, suddenly pressed 
his own. 

A barrel of water shipped over the bow when 
the canoe buried its nose in the grand swell 
drenched them both as it rolled from end to end, 

“Bail!” Carlisle commanded the middlemen. 

With a mighty trembling the canoe shook itself 
free and, aided by the increased buoyancy as the 
shipped water was flung out, rose upon the 
silver-gtay backs of the swells, tobogganed down 
a series of fluid terraces, and shot between two 
madly gyrating whirlpools studded with stump- 
like rocks. 

Once more Waseyawin uttered a violent yell. 
The four paddles of the middlemen came down 
into the swirl, and though the giant tentacles of 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 


71 


the twin maelstroms gripped and tore at the 
craft like the arms of a gigantic devilfish, the 
added impetus carried them through. 

They were in the leaping, lashing billows near 
the end of the rapids. A few more strokes meant 
calmer water, but squarely in the path showed a 
half-sunken boulder, round, wave-worn, dark- 
green in colour, standing like some Titan warrior 
of old taking upon his bruised face the eternal 
hammering of the river. 

Swiftly Waseyawin jabbed his paddle deep 
under the bow to swing wide, but the already 
strained paddle snapped like a dead branch in 
his hands. The head of the canoe swerved back 
toward the rock. Missowa, the steersman, taking 
the opposite stroke to Waseyawin’s, in the 
pivotal shift, could not throw the stern ’round far 
enough to clear, and before the middleman be- 
hind Waseyawin could hand him his paddle in 
place of the broken one, the craft reared upon the 
boulder. 

A grating sound ran along the bottom, and the 
thin birch-bark heaved in the centre. All in a 
flash they lodged, whirled half-way ’round, were 
spewed off, to bring up with a drifting smash 
among a litter of granite blocks lying like thrown 
dice in the shore shallows. The canoe pitched 
on its side, spilling its occupants headforemost 
into the rubble-filled pools, and the first ones 
out of the tangle were Waseyawin and Missowa. 

Crying to their middlemen to salve the canoe, 
packs, and arms, they rushed to the aid of the 
whites. Father Andrews, in water to his waist 


72 


AMBUSH 


and weighted by his soaked cassock, was slowly 
making his way ashore. Carlisle lay motionless 
in a foot of water, his head upon a stone, with 
Joan bending over him. 

“He’s stunned,” she gasped as Missowa and 
Waseyawin reached her. “See the bruise there 
on his temple? His leg is hurt and bleeding as 
well. Carry him ashore quickly.” 

For answer Missowa whipped the gay sash 
from his waist over her mouth, while Waseyawin 
seized her wrists and tied them behind her back 
with the fillet from his head. 

“Be quick, my Cree brother,” urged Missowa, 
deftly knotting the gag. “The Free-Trading 
men must not find us here.” 

He pushed the girl up the bank in Waseyawin’s 
charge and, exerting all his lithe strength, raised 
the limp form of the Factor and followed. 
Father Andrews splashed out on his heels, and 
after the priest ran the four middlemen, carry- 
ing the arms and packs and rent canoe upon 
their heads. 

They left no dripping water trail if any one 
should search, for the rocks for yards around were 
wet with the spray of the rapids, and once off the 
rocks they staggered up the granite bed of a little 
spring that trickled the length of a deep ravine. 

At the head of the ravine they clambered over 
lichened stones, dank moss carpets, and beds of 
fern as green as chrysoprase. Through the 
gloom of the pines, treading soundless as ghosts 
upon the fallen needles, they passed and came out 
on rolling ground forested with silvery birch. 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 73 

They had worked over half a mile from the 
river, and in a tiny clearing Missowa let down 
his burden upon a bed of dry leaves. Waseyawin 
pushed Joan to a seat upon a mossy rock beside 
and, taking a rifle from the middlemen who 
crowded up, glided back to keep watch upon the 
river. 

Father Andrews seized one of the packs and 
from it extracted the medicine kit he was ac- 
customed to carry in his ministering among the 
Indians. It contained a flat tin flask full of 
brandy, and, using the screw-cap, the priest 
poured a few spoonfuls between Carlisle’s lips and 
began to chafe him while Missowa cut away the 
water-soaked, blood-stained moccasin from his leg. 

“A flesh wound,” announced the Ojibway, 
unemotionally, baring the calf and manipulating 
the leg to feel for a break. “The bones are 
sound.” 

“That’s good!” Andrews exclaimed. “I was 
afraid the jagged rocks had broken it clean.” 

“But, Ayumeaookemou (priest), it was not 
the rocks.” 

“Ah-hah! What then?” 

“It was the Free-Trader’s bullet, and had it 
not been for the twist of my paddle, it would have 
been though the Factor’s heart!” 

Father Andrews gave a startled exclamation. 
His eyes met Missowa’ s, fell to the bullet-torn 
limb, and then shifted quickly to Joan’s face. 
He and Missowa had been talking in Cree, but he 
realized all at once that she understood the 
language. She could not speak for the sash over 


74 


AMBUSH 


her mouth, yet into her eyes flooded a silent 
eloquence, surprise, commiseration, anxiety — 
yes, something deeper, Andrews thought! 

She rose from the rock. One of the middle- 
men made as if to stop her, but the priest shook 
his head, and she came and stood behind while 
they w T orked upon Carlisle. For nearly an hour 
they persisted before he showed signs of returning 
consciousness. Missowa had the leg bathed, the 
bullet-rip rinsed with pure water from a spring 
near by, poulticed with healing balsam gum 
brought from the ridge beyond the clearing, and 
all neatly bandaged before the Factor’s eyes 
opened. 

When they did open upon the mask-like mos- 
quito veil of the priest, upon Missowa’s swarthy 
face with the surface lights in the black eyes 
gleaming in solicitation almost akin to tender- 
ness, upon Joan standing there in her gag and 
bonds, Carlisle felt himself still in the nightmare 
of the canoe smash. 

“ Wha — at — what under the ” he began in 

shaky syllables. 

“ Don’t talk too loud,” warned Father An- 
drews. “We’re hidden here from the Free- 
Traders, and voices carry far in the forest.” 

“The Free-Traders are gone,” spoke the voice 
of Waseyawin who glided like a wraith out of the 
gloom of the pines. “They came searching at 
the foot at the rapids. They found all our 
paddles, the nose-cloth of the Golden Daughter, 
and one pack that was washed away. It was the 
nose-cloth that set Shining Horns to weeping.” 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 75 

“They think the canoe sunk and all of us 
drowned?” demanded Carlisle. 

“So,” answered Waseyawin. “The grief of 
Shining Horns was terrible to see. I think he 
would have cast himself into the whirlpool had 
not others led him away. They dared not wait 
long, these others, for fear of the French Com- 
pany’s men behind. They went on with our own 
men as prisoners in their canoes, and it is well 
they went, because Black-beard and his followers 
came after. I waited to see if that would come 
to pass before I left my watch.” 

“Your eyes are good, my Cree brother,” 
eulogized Missowa, “even as good as your paddle 
in white water. Now that Shining Horns and 
his men are gone Golden Daughter may be 
freed.” 

With deft hands the Ojibway unknotted the 
sash and whipped it back on his waist, at the 
same time handing Waseyawin the fillet for his 
head. 

“Oh, my poor father!” cried Joan, tears in her 
eyes. “He’ll be half -crazed. And Richelieu 
may catch him yet upon the river.” 

“How much start had he, Andrews?” asked 
Carlisle. 

“About an hour,” informed the priest. 

“Then Richelieu won’t catch him, Joan,” 
decided the Factor. “Once warned, Wayne is 
not the man to be overtaken. He’ll have a 
scouting craft out behind his brigade. If hostile 
canoes are reported, he can leave the river the 
same as we did. So don’t worry. Your father 


76 


AMBUSH 


will be safe, all right, and we’ll bring you back 
to him as sound as ever at Sturgeon Lake.” 

“But yourself, Paul,” she burst out, impetu- 
ously dropping to her knees beside him, “your 
own hurts ” 

“I’m all right,” checked Carlisle with a smile. 
“There’s nothing the matter with me but a good 
headache and a gash in the leg that a spiked 
branch might have made.” 

“Yet how can you forgive me my father’s 
intent?” 

“You know why, don’t you?” he murmured 
so low that the others could not hear. “ Besides, 
he fired out of desperate fear for you, as any 
one — as I myself would have done. Don’t you 
worry, girl, but hurry and dry your clothes. 
The Indians will have a shelter ready for you in a 
few minutes. Missowa, Waseyawin,” address- 
ing his familiars, “bid the middlemen make three 
bough camps and small fires in front that will 
not smoke above the tree-tops. Also gather and 
cook the evening meal.” 

Very soon the shelters were ready and occupied 
one by each of the three whites, shelters con- 
sisting simply of circles of forked saplings thrust 
into the ground like teepee poles, overlaid with 
balsam boughs and floored with the same. In 
the opening glowed heaps of charred fragments 
taken from blackened tree trunks and stumps, 
the remains of former forest fires. 

In the central space of the clearing Waseyawin 
had kindled another cooking fire. Missowa had 
taken the middlemen off to set a length of gill net 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 


77 


in the river and hunt the evergreens for grouse. 
Presently these returned with both finned and 
feathered game, several giant trout and pickerel 
and half-a-dozen partridges knocked from their 
roosts by sticks. 

The delicious odour of crisping fish, of broiling 
partridge, of baking bannocks, of simmering tea, 
filled the camp space, drifting tantalizingly upon 
the evening breeze. With magical celerity a 
home-like atmosphere had been created in the 
midst of the wilderness, and the tiny clearing 
hard by the pine gloom and walled round with 
the creeping dusk took on the well-defined air 
of ancient use. 

Lying in their shelters the whites ate their 
meal while they dried their steaming clothes, and 
once they were done with the serving the canoe- 
men squatted by themselves, bending over the 
kettles and pots of the central fire, their red- 
bronze frames and swarthy faces touched car- 
mine by the flamelight. Hungrily they ate and 
lighted their pipes, Missowa delaying long 
enough to bring Carlisle’s own pipe to his teepee. 

“Here is dry tobacco. Factor,” he announced, 
“and the steel that makes the fire (flint and 
steel).” 

“Put them there,” directed Carlisle, “and, 
Missowa, have the middlemen whittle out new 
paddles, weaving woollen streamers for them 
from the ball of wool you will find in the pack. 
Also, see that the canoe is mended with care. 
We start on at dawn.” 

When the Ojibway had gone back to the fire 


78 


AMBUSH 


to set the middlemen at their tasks, Carlisle 
filled and lighted his pipe, ecstatically savouring 
the tobacco’s perfume and the other camp fra- 
grances that stole so familiarly into his nostrils, 
the supper scent, the pungent wood smoke, the 
spice of balsam and pine, the resinous pitch the 
Indians were melting, the steam of human gar- 
ments. 

For it was ever at such moments as these that 
the incomparable thrill of the life in the wild 
rushed over him in a surge of joy so fierce as to 
be akin to pain. Here men lived, he exulted! 
Here was no cramped, purposeless existence, no 
desk-bound slavery such as he had come to visual- 
ize in his four years of London. This was the 
epic life, the Homeric essay, the Iliad of the forest ! 

Dreamily his eyes and his soul and his senses 
lapsed, and before he was aware his hand slipped 
limply from his pipe and the pipe fell from his 
lips. The night crept on. The young moon 
showed for a little over the balsam ridge, bathing 
the forest like a radiant mist, glowing through the 
latticed branches, checkering each clearing in 
silver and black, overlaying the ghostly birch 
trunks with luminous pearl. 

The transient light filtered through Carlisle’s 
bough shelter, touched his face, and receded 
again as the moon set behind the ridge. But 
neither moonrise nor moonset served to waken 
him. Still he dozed, till the slight scuffle of a 
moccasin stirred him. 

Yet, true to his woodsman’s instinct, he stirred 
inwardly, not outwardly, giving no muscular 


THE ILIAD OP THE FOREST 


79 


response to the impression from without till he 
should have sensed whether friend or enemy 
wore the scuffling moccasins. His body retained 
its immobility. Only his eyelids parted, almost 
imperceptibly, till he could glimpse the fire- 
lit entrance where his mosquito smudge flared 
and smoked and hissed its defiance to the 
whining pests. 

Then he saw in their dainty materialism the 
moccasins that had wakened him, two tiny 
creations of elkskin, like Cinderella slippers of 
the forest, so small that they could have walked 
upon his outstretched palms. They revealed 
the identity of his visitor. None but Joan wore 
such fairy footgear. 

He shifted his furtive gaze upward, to see her 
swelling-hipped, full-bosomed figure silhouetted 
in the ochre glow. He could mark the wonder- 
ful fairness of her skin, the sparkle of the lake- 
blue eyes, the shimmer of her hair that gleamed 
like a frosted web of fine gold threads with every 
flare of the smudge. 

“Paul, how does your wound feel now?” she 
asked. 

Some sudden, unaccountable whim kept Car- 
lisle silent. 

Hesitatingly Joan stepped over to where 
he lay upon the balsam boughs. He seemed 
asleep, his eyelids closed. In the dim light of 
the interior she noted the bandage upon his 
stockinged leg and the discoloration of the 
bruise upon his temple, and a flood of mingled 
feeling rushed over her. 


80 


AMBUSH 


All in an instant she was swept and shaken by 
the romantic glamour of their first meeting that 
eventful night at Grande Portage, by the sweet 
companionship of their days of wilderness travel, 
by the passionate unbaring of Carlisle’s heart in 
the wild dash through the Rapide des Boisfranc. 

Standing over him, her own heart beat in a 
tumult, and though her intellect flashed a vague 
warning of restraint, it could not curb the 
impulsive surge of her emotion. Swiftly she 
stooped, pressed her warm lips to Carlisle’s lips, 
and fled back on silent, winged feet to her own 
tent: 

His fibres all a-throb, Carlisle opened his 
eyes. Instinctively his arms went out, but 
Joan had vanished too quickly. Like a wood 
nymph she had come and like a wood nymph 
she had gone, too ethereal for the human grasp- 
ing. 

All Carlisle’s arms encircled was the empty air. 
All his wide-open eyes saw was the stoic Indians 
mending the six-fathom canoe. It lay on its side 
by the fire, one gunwale propped up with sticks, 
the yellow bark shining deep orange under the 
magic flames. 

Over the rents Missowa and Waseyawin were 
fitting strips of bark while the middlemen 
poured on the resinous pitch. A study in red, 
yellow, bronze, crimson, umber, and orange they 
worked, ringed ’round by the velvet band of the 
forest starred here and there with the prying eyes 
of the watchers of the wild. 

Carlisle followed the shift of the eyes un- 


THE ILIAD OF THE FOREST 


81 


consciously, and by the eyes and the seurryings 
among the leaves he read the identity of each — 
a darting weasel or mink, a timid doe with her 
fawn, a porcupine running a log, a pack of full- 
bellied harmless wolves worming like dogs to- 
ward the fascinating glare. 

And in the trees above he read analogous 
sounds, the feathered wild things of the air going 
abroad with their kin of the earth, the plaintive 
whippoorwill, the rasping night hawk, the hoot- 
ing owl on its noiseless pinions. All the wilder- 
ness had awakened with the moonset. The 
susurrus of the pine sang overhead like passing 
winds, and winds themselves, arising no one 
knew how, dying no one knew where, came and 
went like unseen hosts on the march. 

Beaver slapped their pistol-like warnings in 
the ponds below the balsam ridge. Bull moose 
called from the thickets beside. Never for a 
moment was the night-world still. Yet, buoy- 
ing all these noises, Carlisle sensed an underswell 
of silence, the poise of the lonely land, passive, 
brooding, Nirvanic, the voiceless spirit of the 
North itself lying mute in its ambush, waiting 
to spring upon men in the unguarded moment 
of their weakness. 

The pale yellow stars in the purple sky seemed 
planets appointed to another sphere, and the 
only gleam which showed in the dark, austere 
immensity of the earth itself was the fitful sweep 
of the aurora above the trees on the ridge and 
the phosphorescent smear of organic gases 
waving over the black muck marsh beneath. 


82 


AMBUSH 


Carlisle gazed at the pyrotechnic display till 
too-prolonged gazing began to produce internal 
flashes in his brain and he dropped his head for 
sleep. 

All the rest of the camp slumbered save 
Missowa and Waseyawin, who before turning in 
with their fellows were sitting a moment by the 
fire pointing with the stems of their pipes at the 
aurora and the will-o’-the-wisps. They were 
talking in hissing, gurgling, lisping Cree, and the 
trend of their speech was the last sound to reach 
Carlisle’s drowsy ears. 

“Behold, my Cree brother,” spoke Missowa, 
“there are the Spirit Lights in their summer 
garb, the souls of our forefathers rushing rank on 
rank into battle. For the dead die not, Waseya- 
win, but live to hunt and fish and fight again 
even as you and I shall do. Their robes of 
light and flashing spears are but signs for their 
children and their children’s children here in the 
forest below.” 

“Ae, Missowa,” nodded the Cree, “signs that 
we will follow when our last campfire is burned. 
But these others,” indicating the dancing, in- 
candescent will-o’-the-wisps, “we do not follow. 
For they, my O jib way brother, are the lures of 
our enemies, of Shining Horns and his men. 
They think us at the bottom of the whirlpools, 
and these lights they have put out by magic 
to lead our drowned souls astray!” 


CHAPTER SIX 


THE DEAD ARISE 

Three hundred miles of headland-broken, 
island-studded, gale-thrashed, roller-raped Winni- 
peg lay behind, one hundred and more of the 
sinuous Saskatchewan, and at last through the 
long twilight of a Northern evening Cumberland 
House loomed up on Pine Island Lake, the 
western arm of the Sturgeon. 

July had run out upon Lake Winnipeg where 
head winds held them behind sheltering points, 
where erratic squalls beached them upon stormy 
lee shores, where rain-choked gales flailed them 
upon barren islets, smothering any attempt at 
fire, levelling any attempt at shelter, roaring and 
ramping for five days at a stretch. It was the 
first week of August and the end of Carlisle’s 
long journey from James Bay. 

The end, and how familiar an end ! His mind 
turned back to the time when he had sojourned 
here with Thompson long years before, planning 
and executing for the day of undisputed su- 
premacy of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and his 
blood leaped as he glimpsed the well-remembered 
log post buildings, the stout stockade, the tall 
flagstaff with the blood-red banner of his cor- 
poration flapping from its tip. 

83 


84 


AMBUSH 


All about the stockade straggled Indian tee- 
pees of the tribes come in to trade. The smoke 
of many teepee fires spiralled through the dusk 
and a babel of noises rose from the camps, the 
guttural jargon of the hunters and squaws, 
laughter of the maidens, wails of papooses, 
shrieks of children at play, barking of mongrel 
dogs. 

Suddenly these noises stilled ! Men lining the 
stockade, standing upon the firing steps and lean- 
ing over the palisades, had caught sight of 
Carlisle’s huge canoe. A voice commanded 
silence, and then with a surge a loud cheer burst 
from whites and Indians alike. 

They recognized even in the dusk the Hudson’s 
Bay flag in the canoe bow, the long gonfalon in 
the stern, the gaudy costumes, woollen streamers, 
slanting feathers that graced the canoemen of a 
Factor. Here then was the new overlord they ex- 
pected — here was Carlisle of far Moose Factory! 

The gate swung open swiftly, and a bare- 
headed, swarthy-skinned, heavily built half- 
breed came forward. Cree blood showed in his 
eyes and feature casting, and by these signs as 
well as by the description Eugene Drummond 
had given of him Carlisle immediately recognized 
him as Henry Galt, the chief trader who had been 
left in charge of the post awaiting his taking it 
over. 

Son of one of the earlier white adventurers 
who had married among the Crees, Drummond 
had said, and now as he advanced with long, 
stalking strides he spoke a salutation in Cree. 


THE DEAD ARISE 


85 


“Welcome, Factor,” he greeted respectfully, 
glancing the rest over with his black eyes but 
seeming not to see any other than his superior as 
he glanced. “You have had a hard journey I 
read.” 

“True, Galt, a hard one,” returned Carlisle. 
“Through fire and flood on the rivers and storm 
on the lakes. But we are here at last.” 

“Ae, you are here, and it is good that your 
flag should float.” 

With his own hands, Galt took the streaming 
gonfalon from the stern of the canoe. It was 
soiled with river water, ripped by snags, scorched 
from the breath of forest fire, but these scars on 
the silk but lent it greater prestige. Proudly the 
chief trader carried it into the stockade ground 
and ordered the post banner lowered. Quickly 
he fastened the gonfalon on and bade the Indians 
haul away on the halyard. 

As he emerged again the two banners rose to 
the staff tip, Company’s flag and Factor’s flag 
flying side by side. Another cheer rang from the 
palisade, and as Galt waved his hand the guns 
up-pointed and blazed in salute. 

“Factor,” spoke the chief trader in the 
oratorical manner of his mother’s people, “I 
hand you over the post.” 

Carlisle drew himself up proudly upon the 
shore. The flesh wound in his leg had practically 
healed. He stood straight and strong. 

“I take it from good hands, Galt,” he ac- 
cepted. “You I choose to retain as my chief 
trader. Eugene Drummond is my brigade leader. 


86 


AMBUSH 


and it is news of Drummond I want to hear now. 
Have you seen anything of him?” 

“Three days ago Drummond came, he and 
other Hudson’s Bay men I did not know, as 
prisoners among the crews of Wayne the Free- 
Trader. I had orders not to bother anybody till 
you came. I knew something had gone wrong, 
but I obeyed my orders.” 

An exclamation of joy burst from Joan. She 
seized Carlisle’s arm with a little hysterical 
laugh, though the tears were in her eyes. 

“He is here, Paul — he is here!” she exulted. 
“Richelieu didn’t catch him after all. But I 
was so fearful, even though you were so sure ! ’ 
“Yes, it’s good news for you,” smiled Carlisle. 
“I thought Richelieu could hardly match him 
for woodcraft. And Richelieu himself, Galt, ’’ad- 
dressing his chief trader again, “ what about him? ” 
“Four days ago the Northwester came,” 
answered Galt, pointing where a scarce half- 
mile away Richelieu’s post flying the Northwest 
flag showed vaguely in the deepening dusk. “In 
June he took the Sturgeon Lake brigades down 
to Grande Portage with furs. Now he comes 
with the winter supplies.” 

“I know,” Carlisle laughed, grimly. “I met 
him myself at Grande Portage, also on the way 
into the Pays d’en Haut. And he arrived first, 
eh? A day ahead! You hear that, Joan? 
Your father gave Richelieu the slip by leaving 
the river as I imagined.” 

“Yes, yes, but take me to him at once,” Joan 
pleaded. “You know he thinks I’m dead.” 


THE DEAD ARISE 


87 


“In a moment,” assented Carlisle. “Galt, 
order the men of the post to stand to their 
arms in case of trouble and you yourself go on 
and give the peace sign at Fort Wayne. I’ll 
take my crew as bodyguard although I don’t 
suppose that is hardly necessary. Ha — you, 
Father Andrews! Like an ungrateful boy I was 
almost forgetting you. Go on inside, Father, 
and take the freedom of Cumberland House till I 
come back.” 

“No, Paul, I’ll go with you,” decided the 
priest. “I like to be by your side in case of 
trouble to add my influence to your own.” 

“All right then, Father! Go ahead, Galt!” 

Wayne’s post stood as close to Cumberland 
House as Richelieu’s. It, too, was less than 
half a mile away, although, close as the posts 
were together, it was no mystery that Carlisle 
had never seen Joan till he set eyes on her at 
Grande Portage. 

It was many years since he was here with 
Thompson, and Wayne at that time was estab- 
lishing other posts on the Saskatchewan’s 
branches in territory far removed from Pine 
Island Lake. His Pine Island Lake post, only a 
trader’s cabin in the beginning, had grown as his 
trade grew, and he had added to it piece by piece 
warehouse, fur house, spacious dwelling-house, 
all of logs, till his independent post under the 
Free-Trade flag was as large as that of either the 
Hudson’s Bay Company’s or the Northwesters’. 

Only lately had he deemed it necessary to 
protect it in any material sense, increasing 


88 


AMBUSH 


friction with both companies compelling the 
erection of the palisade against which Galt now 
hammered. 

“Who’s that?” demanded the gatekeeper, 
peering through the gloom. “You, Galt? What 
d’ye want?” 

But Galt, his open palm held out in the peace 
sign, was forestalled by the eager, excited Joan. 

“Open the gate, Murdock, open the gate!” 
she commanded, peremptorily. “It’s Joan. I 
want my father. These men are friends. Open 
quickly.” 

Like a man who sees the dead arise the gate- 
keeper obeyed, and Joan brushed rapidly past 
him, rushing at the head of the others, leading 
them through the yard toward the dwelling 
house. 

The rough benches upon the long veranda 
across the house front were empty, but the door 
stood open, a yellow square of lamplight eddied 
through and through with blue tobacco smoke, 
and in the frame of the doorway as in a painted 
picture they could see a group of men inside, 
Wayne, Mason, and others lounging in chairs 
about a big table, conferring over papers, smok- 
ing long black pipes. 

Joan sprang over the veranda and framed her- 
self in the doorway. 

Carlisle at her shoulder saw the faces of the 
men inside distorted by a colossal amazement, 
incredulity, and darkened by the sudden shadow 
of superstition which their wilderness natures 
could never wholly flout. He saw Mason’s 


THE DEAD ARISE 


89 


brown-bearded, long-jawed face tilted back, the 
pipe poised in his hand, his yellowed teeth 
jarred apart, not in triumphant grin as he had 
seen it once before but in speechless gape. 

Wayne himself, his pipe dropping on to the 
table, had risen from his chair to his great height, 
his features as impassive as carved mahogany 
but his fawn-green eyes blazing like molten disks. 
Such a look in any living eyes Carlisle had never 
seen. It approached most nearly the vision of 
the seer, the prophet, the vision that seems to 
pierce the gray rime of earthly things and behold 
the secret realms of another world. 

“ Verna ! Verna ! ” he articulated in a whisper. 

“No, no father, I am not my mother’s ghost!” 
declared Joan, crying full-voiced, leaping full- 
blooded across the floor. “I am Joan, and I am 
not at the bottom of Rapide des Boisfranc. Oh, 
my dear — my dear, I’m sorry I’ve made you 
grieve!” 

She was in his arms, impulsive, palpitant, 
moving, her wheaten hair mingled with his 
brown curls, her cheek pressing his like a rose 
petal lying upon an autumn-browned leaf. 
Abruptly Wayne’s grim strength went from 
him. He trembled like the slim poplars on the 
wind-blown Saskatchewan hills and sagged back 
into his chair, his daughter on his knee. 

“By the Doom, girl — by — the — Doom!” was 
all he could mutter. 

“See, I’m a prisoner of war, father!” she 
laughed, gaily. “And I’ve come for exchange. 
You’re to give Paul his twenty-five men in place 


90 


AMBUSH 


of me. Am I not worth it? Besides, I’ve 
promised him you would.” 

“Paul — Paul,” stammered Wayne in bewilder- 
ment, “who ” 

Then his eyes followed Joan’s laughing ones 
to rest upon Carlisle gazing down the table 
length upon him. Though the Factor and the 
rest had entered on Joan’s heels, Wayne saw him 
for the first time. 

He had seen nothing before but the feminine 
vision of his dead, living again in his daughter’s 
image, and now he leaped violently to his feet 
once more, pushing Joan aside into his chair as 
he leaped. 

Carlisle saw that his eyes had their earthly 
focus back, bitter, implacable, savage, and in 
them he faced the terrible, lightning-like blaze of 
passion he knew so well. 

“You, Carlisle,” choked Wayne, “you dragged 
my girl by the brink of hell through those rapids 
and you dare to come and stand in my post 
afterward — you cursed spit of your drunken 
English father!” 

“Stop right there, Wayne!” warned Carlisle, 
a wave of red anger surging over his own face. 
“For your daughter’s sake I’ve taken a good deal 
of defiance from you. For her sake maybe I’ll 
take a lot more. I can’t say. But don’t touch 
my father’s honour with that reckless tongue of 
yours!” 

“Touch his honour? I’ll touch his very 
bones in his grave and make them writhe in 
shame! You saw her there in the doorway — 


THE DEAD ARISE 91 

Joan? That was Verna — her mother — all rose 
and golden. 

“That was how I saw her last the day of 
Major Butler’s raid on the Wyoming. The day 
his Rangers — the cursed lusting hounds — came 
by, under Captain Charles Carlisle and Carlisle — 
the vilest hound of them all — struck her down in 
my own house while I was away!” 

“You lie, Wayne! You lie abominably, devil- 
ishly! None but armed men were killed in that 
raid.” 

“So the ignorant tale-makers tell, but we 
who went through the fire and slaughter know 
better. We who lost our homes and our loved 
ones have memories that nothing can efface!” 

“Andrews, Andrews,” groaned Carlisle, his 
face whitened to an ashy shade under his bronze, 
“tell him he lies! You knew my father. You 
were his friend, and my guardian. Tell him he 
lies!” 

“My God forgive me, Paul, but I can’t,” 
murmured the priest, catching him by the arm. 
“I know nothing but what Wayne has said and 
that the raid was made in liquor. Liquored men 
are madmen and their brains do not know what 
their hands are doing.” 

“And you knew, Andrews? And you never 
told me? But, high heaven, he was my father, 
my father!” 

Reiterating the words, Carlisle stood gazing 
wildly across the table at Joan, staring into a 
face as pale as his own, into eyes as wide-set with 
anguish. 


92 


AMBUSH 


“And you, Joan, you knew ” he began. 

“Only the — the — truth, Paul,” Joan cried. 
“My father never told me whose hand was in it.” 

“There was no need,” snarled Wayne, “no 
need till now! Am I a liar, then, Carlisle? If 
you think so, go and ask Richelieu. I have no 
love for him at this late date, but he was once our 
friend, for he was as dashing an officer as one 
would find anywhere in those days. 

“Simon Richelieu was a nineteen-year-old 
lieutenant then, officering what local force we 
had, and he was the one who took me home and 
showed me the crumpled, bleeding, breathless 
thing that war makes of woman! And, a few 
hours before, I had left her all rose and golden! 
By heaven, go and ask Richelieu, I tell you! 
He saw!” 

“I — will — not,” panted Carlisle in a passion 
of despair. “One word of Richelieu’s corrobo- 
ration and I would kill him!” 

“By the Doom, you hold a tarnished honour 
brightly! It’s well Charlie Carlisle fell on the 
Wyoming. It would have been better for your- 
self if you had never lived. When I drifted 
north from my homeless valley with my girl of 
four I swore an oath against the Carlisle breed, 
and by the grave that lies southward on Wy- 
oming waters I will keep it! Now, go back to 
your post, Carlisle. Joan’s word is mine. Ma- 
son will hand you over your twenty-five men.” 

The petrified Missourian sprang into life again, 
but the Factor did not move. He remained 
staring stupidly at Joan till the priest drew him 


THE DEAD ARISE 


9 $ 

toward the door. Missowa, Waseyawin, and the 
four middlemen crossed the veranda ahead like 
gliding shadows, and like gliding shadows they 
mingled in the yard with Mason’s muster of the 
astonished Hudson’s Bay prisoners — Drum- 
mond, Lewis, Garry, Lea, Hampton, Jarvis, 
Wells, the James Bay Crees, O jib ways, Salteaux. 

But of these Carlisle took no note. He walked 
unseeing, urged by the priest’s hand, across the 
dark yard. 

“ Andrews,” he burst out as they passed 
through the gate, “did my father know the 
district he was raiding?” 

“Yes, Paul.” 

“The people?” 

“Yes.” 

“The house?” 

“Yes.” 

“Oh, my God — her?” 

“Yes. I can’t lie to you. You know I 
can’t!” 

“Did my father love her?” he blurted, harshly. 
“For heaven’s sake, tell me if he loved her?” 

“Yes, he loved her,” declared Andrews in a 
broken voice. “That much I know. When 
your mother died in the Niagara Post, Paul, his 
was a lonely life. He loved Verna Miller! Aye, 
and so did the stripling Richelieu, though Wayne 
won her from them both ! ” 

Like lightning the significance of Andrews’ 
words flashed home to Carlisle as he stumbled 
along the rough shore of Pine Island Lake 
toward Cumberland House. Before him was 


94 


AMBUSH 


more than the competition of three rival trading 
companies, more than the essay at empire of 
three rival corporations. 

He was plunged into the tense struggle of souls 
in combat, all the wrongs of another generation 
crying for their righting, with the very spirits of 
the dead arising from the grave to claim that 
righting. 


CHAPTER SEVEN 


TRADE WAR 

Sitting around the counter of Galt’s trading- 
room at morning, the Hudson’s Bay officers 
leaped swiftly to their feet as Carlisle came in. 
All the sleepless night he had shut himself up in 
his council room, and now they hung upon his 
decision concerning the course to be pursued 
against Northwesters and Free-Traders alike. 

“Is it war, Factor?” they chorused, eagerly. 

The marks of sleeplessness and inner conflict 
showed upon Carlisle, pallor of skin under his 
bronze, dark circles around his eyes, a weariness 
in the gray eyes themselves, but he nodded with 
his grim smile. 

“It’s war,” he announced, “perhaps in all 
its bitter phases, but a trade war first of all. It 
starts to-day, this morning, on the minute, and 
I’ve work cut out for each of you to do.” 

A murmur of approbation stirred the group. 
It was what they hungered for, action, strategy, 
blows, no doubt, in the end. 

Carlisle took a map from his pocket and spread 
it open on the counter. 

“Look,” he urged, pointing, “get the situation 
fixed in your minds! Richelieu’s post was the 
first post on Sturgeon Lake. Tom and Joe 

95 


96 


AMBUSH 


Frobisher built it in 1772, and it was built in 
defiance of the Hudson’s Bay Company’s charter. 

“That it has passed, since the amalgamation 
of the Montreal traders as the Northwest Com- 
pany, into Richelieu’s hands does not alter that 
fact. It’s trading where the Hudson’s Bay 
Company alone has the right to trade. Sam 
Hearne came up the Churchill in 1774 and 
masked it with this post, Fort Cumberland, but 
competition hasn’t killed it — yet. 

“Then, years after, Wayne buffaloed his way 
in — a second poacher. Now, men, this Cumber- 
land District is the district of the West. Who 
holds the Cumberland District holds the Sas- 
katchewan, and who holds the Saskatchewan 
holds the West. You understand me?” 

“Om,” nodded Drummond, emphatically, 
speaking for them all, “dey understand dat all 
right.” 

“So did our sleeping overlords on James Bay 
when they woke up,” Carlisle went on. “That’s 
why they sent Hearne up here. That’s why 
they hurried other men in to build other forts, a 
perfect network of them from Hudson’s Bay to 
the Rockies, from Athabasca Lake to the head- 
waters of the Missouri. 

“Those forts will hold the West only if 
Cumberland House holds Sturgeon Lake. Be- 
cause, you see, the Saskatchewan is the great 
highway from the Rockies, and Sturgeon Lake 
commands the water lanes to it on the east, the 
west, and the north. There’s the point. It’s 
the connection of the Northern lakes and rivers 


TRADE WAR 


97 


here with the Churchill River that gives this 
place its strategic importance.” 

“Losh, yes, Factor,” spoke Garry, “and what 
wass it you would be asking us to do?” 

“I’ll tell you in a moment. I just want to 
emphasize the danger. You know the strength 
of the Northwesters, and I can tell you in all 
confidence that the Government of Canada is 
pitted through and through with Northwest ad- 
herents. Where they are not actually share- 
holders in the company, they are in close re- 
lationship with shareholders. 

“The Hudson’s Bay Company is powerful 
in the Government ranks in England, but it is 
the Northwest Company which wields that 
power here. If we loose our grip, the Hudson’s 
Bay Company may as well surrender its charter.” 

“The teevil!” exclaimed Lea, astounded, 
while all the men, suddenly smitten by the 
magnitude of their undertaking, exchanged 
glances of wonder. 

“Into the hands of the Northwesters it will 
go,” Carlisle declared. “And, without our op- 
position in the field, they will not be long in 
swallowing up the Free-Traders.” 

“Yer don’t mean to s’y. Factor, that the 
Northwesters ’ll stand supreme, do ye?” burst 
out Jarvis, the Cockney clerk. “Blimey if the 
men that’s fought under the H. B. C. flag so 
long could stand that, ye know. And, s’elp me, 
wot is the territory of our charter? Ay n’t it all 
the ground drained by the rivers wot run into 
Hudson’s B’y?” 


98 


AMBUSH 


“Yes,” smiled the Factor, “but that ter- 
ritory is tremendously big and vague, and its 
boundaries have never been properly defined. I 
have private information that the Northwesters 
will soon send an expedition over the Rockies to 
the Pacific. The headwaters of the Saskatche- 
wan are by no means the limits of their ambi- 
tions and besides, the Free-Trade movement 
is to be feared as much as the Northwest ad- 
vance. 

“You know yourselves that Wayne has in- 
dependent traders planted all over the West in 
his different posts. If both the Hudson’s Bay 
and Northwest companies go down in a death- 
grapple the Free-Traders will step in and gather 
all the spoils of the West. Three strong com- 
panies are reaching out for it, and I tell you in 
all seriousness, men, that two of those companies 
have to be smashed before another summer.” 

“Then to the Dowl wi’ the Free-Traders and 
the Northwesters alike ! ” cried Hampton, belliger- 
ently. “Our own territory be given us by old 
charter. Us corned out here under our com- 
pany’s flag, an’ we ban’t going to see un fall, I 
can assure ’e. You’m counting on we, I reckon. 
Factor, to hold un feet while you’m breaking un 
heads ope.” 

“That’s it, Hampton,” laughed Carlisle. 
“You five men must hold my lines of com- 
munication. That’s why I brought you in. 
Our posts in the Norway House and York Dis- 
tricts have complete control. That makes every- 
thing safe from Lake W innipeg to Hudson’s Bay, 


TRADE WAR 99 

but between here and Lake Winnipeg you must 
hold the lines as I say. 

“ Galt and Drummond I keep by me, of course. 
Lea goes to the Nepowin, Lewis to the Pas, 
Garry to Moose Lake, Hampton to Chimawawin, 
Jarvis to Grand Rapids. You will keep your 
territory clear of interlopers, pay any price to get 
its trade, and await further orders from me. 

“The summer ship from England will reach 
James Bay any day now, and the moment she 
arrives York boats are coming up the Hayes 
River from York Factory with reserve supplies of 
food and trade goods. You will hold these 
boats in relays at Grand Rapids, Chimawawin, 
and the Pas until I send for them. That’s all, 
men. You start at once. Galt and Drum- 
mond will pick out small canoes, outfits, and 
paddlers.” 

In five minutes the fleet was afloat. No man 
other than those Carlisle had addressed had 
been told its mission or its destination, but 
conjecture ran rife through Cumberland House. 
The whites hazarded shrewd guesses concerning 
the Factor’s plans, while the Indian tribe 
herded on the shore, jabbering and pointing at 
the canoes till they disappeared. From the 
doorway of Galt’s trading-room Carlisle watched 
them go, and he had no misgivings as he watched. 

He knew his men, their abilities, limitations, 
merits, and demerits as he knew his own, and 
even after they were gone he saw them still on 
his mental vision — Garry, the man of Inverness 
with his short, broad body, flaming red beard, and 


100 


AMBUSH 


whimsical face; Lea, the Cromarty youth with 
the brown handsomeness of the tall, young 
Highlander; Hampton, ruddy, fleshy, with his 
atmosphere of the freshly turned peat soil and 
his Devon speech; Jarvis, a bunch of wires and 
nerves reeling off his Cockney slang; and Lewis, 
aged, mountainous-framed, gray-haired and gray- 
bearded, craggy-featured as the Hebrides he 
.hailed from. 

They were all picked men, tried in the com- 
pany’s service. Carlisle had chosen them out of 
many on the Bay, and he knew they would not 
fail him. W ells, the South-of -England stripling, 
he had chosen for a different kind of work, that 
of secret service, and him he now sent out in 
another direction. 

His destination was the Seepanock Channel, a 
short water lane connecting the Saskatchewan and 
its tributary the Carrot where they flowed almost 
parallel for a space. His mission was to establish 
a winter camp there and scout along it to pre- 
vent the possible attempt of down-coming 
brigades of rival traders to avoid Pine Island 
Lake and refech the Saskatchewan again far to 
the east of it. 

As the crowd on the shore broke up with the 
passing of the canoes, Carlisle wheeled back to 
Galt’s counter. 

“Let me see your daybook, Galt,” he re- 
quested. 

He turned up the last entered page, the page 
of recent trade, and scanned the entries with a 
practised eye. 


TRADE WAR 101 

Upon the yellow leaves of the well-thumbed 
book the entries ran thus: 

Son-of-the-Stars 10 beaver 10 skins . . ($5.00) 

Amiska 5 skunk 2 skins ..($1.00) 

Running Moose 1 common red fox 1 skin ($0.50) 

2 otter 8 skins . . ($4.00) 

Makwa 1 prime red fox ... 6 skins ($3.00) 

1 cross do 7 skins . . ($3.50) 

1 black do 12 skins ($6.00) 

The unit value was a beaver skin, chosen as 
something concrete that the Indian mind could 
comprehend in default of mathematics and 
currency tokens, and though the unit fluctuated 
in value with different posts it was worth, on the 
average, fifty cents. To the Indian his more 
valuable pelts were simply his beaver skin multi- 
plied as many times as the post trader decreed. 

In the entries Carlisle gazed upon he found few 
of the costlier skins, in fact few of any kind of 
skins, and he knew the reason. These were but 
the feelers, the first light skins of barter. Ever 
slow to bargain and anxious to obtain the great- 
est price for their catch, the hunters delayed, 
awaiting the coming of the new Factor in the 
hope that they might profit more. 

But the amount of that profit they had never 
imagined even in their rosiest dreams, for now 
Carlisle tapped the daybook and gave Galt the 
chief trader a hitherto unheard-of schedule of 
prices. 

“ Double it, Galt,” he ordered. “One beaver 
is worth two skins. Send out the word among 
our Indians and see that some of our Indians 


102 


AMBUSH 


mingle with Wayne’s and Richelieu’s to carry 
the news.” 

Immediately the word went out and trade be- 
gan. The Indians swarmed into the yard and 
covered the trading-room floor. Tall, black- 
eyed, raven-haired, smoky-skinned, they stood 
gaunt of waist and sinewy of limb, clad only in 
deerskin trousers and moccasins. Galt took a 
bag of trade bullets to represent the beaver skins 
which they comprehended. 

They laid down what they had brought. Galt 
gave them its estimated value in trade bullets. 
They traded the bullets back to Galt for what- 
ever supplies they needed. Thus in wilderness 
currency they turned fox, mink, beaver, and other 
skins into flour, sugar, bacon, and other com- 
modities. 

“Nor do I measure my flour and sugar with 
my fingers inside the cup as the Northwesters and 
Free-Traders do,” Galt encouraged them in their 
own language. 

“Neither do I take more of your bullets than 
the value says. And I write no larger debt 
against you in the books than the just debt.” 

The trade grew brisk, and not with the Hud- 
son’s Bay Company’s Indians alone but with the 
tribes the Free-Traders and Northwesters had 
won to their allegiance. Cotameg the Chippewa 
in Carlisle’s service and others visited the teepees 
about Wayne’s and Richelieu’s posts, dropping 
news that sent the occupants of those teepees 
stalking over to Cumberland House. 

At Richelieu’s post Cotameg detached himself 


TRADE WAR 


103 


from all the rest and performed another and un- 
rehearsed act. By a circuitous route he worked 
’round to the rear of the post and there, un- 
marked by any one on the Cumberland House 
side, signalled to a man on the palisades above. 
In a moment the gate opened, and Richelieu him- 
self appeared. 

‘‘What is it, Cotameg?” he whispered. 

“Quick! It is broad daylight, you must re- 
member, and it would not do for us to be seen. 
Mon Dieu , no!” 

“He has sent men to the Nepowin, the Pas, 
Moose Lake, Chimawawin, and Grand Rapids,” 
the Chippewa spoke rapidly. “There is food 
and trade stuff coming up from James Bay. It 
will stay at the river posts till he sends for it. No 
one was to know, but I was hidden in the loft 
while they talked and I heard.” 

“Ron/” exclaimed Richelieu. ! “That is all, 
eh?” 

“He has made two beaver the price of one 
beaver.” 

“ Ciel, a trade war! Then come to me day by 
day, Cotameg. There will be things I must 
know. Voila ! Go back swiftly and secretly.” 

Nor was W ayne long in hearing the news from 
his own Indians, and that very morning he met 
the Hudson’s Bay Company’s challenge by 
advancing the beaver unit another skin. In the 
afternoon Richelieu was compelled to make it 
four skins, and that night Carlisle raised it to five. 

Thereafter it was a colossal game of poker with 
beaver skins for chips and no limits but the topaz 


104 


AMBUSH 


sky overhead. Like the Northland princes they 
were the three played the game with mad per- 
sistence. Never for an instant, night or day, did 
trade slacken, for to slacken was to lose. 

Carlisle, Galt, and Drummond worked in 
turn behind the counter while the Indians they 
dealt with traded and slept in relays or slept not 
at all. Such profit, the tribes well knew, could 
not last long. They availed themselves while 
they might. 

Never had the stoic hunters been moved to 
such excitement. They stalked no more but ran 
violently from post to post, frantic for the high- 
est bid. Around W ayne’s or Richelieu’s counter 
they would be swarming, trading greedily, when 
a fellow tribesman would rush in jabbering and 
away they would surge to Cumberland House 
where beaver was worth another skin. For 
never before had the Northland known the like, 
never before had the poverty-ridden Crees been 
possessed of so much wealth or revelled in so 
much luxury. 

Now their costlier pelts came out, bear, lynx, 
wolf, wolverine, ermine, otter, marten, fisher, the 
prime red fox, crosses, silvers, blacks. Carlisle, 
Galt, and Drummond were pressed harder than 
ever, toiling in a sweat through the sweltering 
August days. 

The trading-room was a-reek with the odour of 
fur. The teepees of the hunters were piled with 
debt they carried away from the store, pyramided 
with flour, sugar, tea, tobacco, bacon, beans. 
The hunters’ squaws came likewise and had 


TRADE WAR 


,105 

their lords clutter them up with soap, ribbon, 
calico, velvet, thimbles, mirrors, beads, silk 
handkerchiefs, Balmoral skirts, huckaback towels, 
and a hundred other useless things. Gay as 
their squaws, these lords went about in Wincy 
shirts with castor-oil rubbed on their heads, 
gloating over the new capotes laid by for colder 
weather, proud of their bright axes, knives, brass- 
bound trade guns, and ammunition. 

Much of the food they wasted in gorging feasts. 
Much of the ammunition they foolishly fired at 
marks. But, in Indian logic, what did it matter? 
By the end of the first mad week Carlisle, su- 
preme in the field, had hammered the price of 
beaver to thirty skins. 

Also by the end of that mad week Cumber- 
land House was stripped of every article of trade 
goods, every pound of provisions. So, too, were 
the other posts, and the Factor congratulated 
himself and his men. He had won his game. It 
was what he aimed at. Too late Wayne had 
awakened to the cost of playing Northern poker. 

The fort was out of farinaceous food, and he 
was forced to send messengers off into the forest 
for others of his independent posts to come to his 
aid with enough supplies to tide him over the 
winter. Richelieu, however, sent no messengers 
forth. He looked at the empty shelves of his 
post, shrugged his shoulders, and awaited Car- 
lisle’s next move. 

It was Saturday night and the Factor, Galt, 
and Drummond with the volunteer help of 
Andrews balanced up the company’s books. Be- 


106 


AMBUSH 


sides forcing the hands of their competitors in the 
matter of supplies, they had cornered the bulk 
of the furs. Galt’s fur room was crammed with 
pelts. 

It was true that they had paid five times too 
much for some of the beaver and other cheaper 
pelts, but they would make up that loss on the 
priceless skins like the black and silver foxes 
which all traders undervalued for the Indians. 
More than that, they had secured the trade, and 
the trade, in the Indian mind, was the psycho- 
logical thing. 

“But are you sure, Galt,” asked Carlisle when 
they finished, “that all our Indians are in? 
None who got debt are missing off the books?” 

“ Only old White Loon, his two sons, nephew, 
and cousin,” answered Galt. “They all lived 
in one family, and they’re all just nicely over the 
smallpox. I got word of their coming in and 
stopped them up the shore by Carcajou Cove. 
They went into camp there. I made them throw 
away their furs but gave them value for them. 

“I dumped new clothes, outfits, supplies, and 
everything for them on the shore and told them 
to strip and leave the old camp naked. They 
walked out bare as babes new-born and took the 
fresh stuff, and then I sent them back on their 
trap lines.” 

“That’s good — you did right, Galt,” com- 
mended Carlisle. “We want no infection here. 
And there are no others?” 

“No.” 

“Then we’ll close up and have a night’s sleep.” 


TRADE WAR 


107 


“Ba gar, yes,” yawned Drummond. .“I’m 
dozin’ in ma stride, me — snorin’ ovaire de 
beaver packs everyw’ere. Bon soir , messieurs . ” 

He lurched off, staggering for sleep, and the 
others rose and followed. 

“I’m glad you finished up before Sunday, 
Paul,” observed Andrews, as they passed up- 
stairs in the Factor’s house. 

“Oh, yes, Father! As you know, most of the 
Factors go on just the same with their trading 
or routing of the brigades, but I believe in resting 
as far as possible one day in seven. See you in 
the morning, Andrews, and hope I’ll be up in time 
for your service ! ” 

Sunday morning broke in a white lake fog, 
dank and woolly, but when Carlisle stepped out 
of his house he saw the sun sluicing away the fog 
with a flood of gold. He beheld the ordered 
march of the rollers, white wave crest behind 
white wave crest as far as the eye could reach, 
running beneath the fog drift, and the tops of the 
pine-clad islands lifting starkly above. 

Andrews was already on the shore, taking his 
stand upon a huge rock that rose up like a giant 
altar, and whites and Indians from all three posts 
were blackening the beach, the bronzed, roughly 
clothed woodsmen, the smoky savages, the 
squaws decked in all their finery with new velvet 
moss-bags for their wailing papooses. 

On this day of truce in their trade war the rival 
companies met on a common ground of worship, 
some out of genuine desire, others out of curiosity, 
more out of sheer idleness. 


108 


AMBUSH 


Richelieu himself arrived with his black beard 
newly trimmed and his resplendent uniform 
cleaned and polished. Despite the peaceful 
appearance of things he had a bodyguard along, 
and he chose his place on the other side of the 
throng from Carlisle, giving him, with exagger- 
ated courtesy, his ramrod bow from the hips 
while the sardonic laugh of the devil lurked in 
his black beard. 

For Wayne or Joan Carlisle looked in vain, and 
a disconcerting qualm disturbed him inwardly. 
All the busy week he had had no glimpse of her, 
and to-day he had hoped — but yonder! Was 
the flash of a woman’s dress flitting over from 
Fort Wayne? He stared, and his heart leaped. 
It was Joan and she was coming alone. Gone 
were her trail garments, the gray wool canoe 
skirt and the mosquito veil. 

She walked bareheaded, a jewel at her throat, 
clad in a clinging silk dress of champagne colour 
with new, snow-white doeskin half-moccasins 
peeping from underneath. A moment he drank 
in the vision of her, all unflawed fairness in the 
full blaze of the sun, all rose and golden as W ayne 
had said of her mother, before she sat down upon 
a boulder on the outskirts of the crowd. 

With prayer and oration in Cree the brief 
service went on, Andrews towering in his black 
cassock upon the rock altar above his motley 
congregation, his strong voice sounding sonor- 
ously from the waterline to the rim of the large 
gathering. To the cadences of the waves break- 
ing upon the beach and the breezes playing 


TRADE WAR 


109 


through the pines they sang their hymns, chant- 
ing in many languages, crying to their divers 
gods. 

Then with a benediction Andrews dismissed 
them, and the adherents of each post began to 
gravitate slowly toward their own precincts. 

Carlisle, watching, saw that Joan did not go 
back directly. As if loath to leave the fresh 
sweetness of the morning, she slipped from the 
crowd and loitered up one of the forest aisles 
between Cumberland House and Fort Wayne. 
For a moment he hesitated, made as if to follow 
Andrews inside the stockade, and then turned off 
up the ferny avenue Joan had taken. 

A little farther on he caught sight of her 
wandering amid the jumble of rock ridges and 
grassy hills that fringed the woodland. All the 
hollows were splashed with the hue of berries, red 
raspberries, golden gooseberries, blueberries, the 
profligate wild black currants. All the hills were 
ablaze with flowers, waves of bluebells, tangles of 
wild pink roses, patches of vivid lilies, a largess of 
yellow daisies running riot everywhere. 

Joan was idling along, bending here and there 
with the supple ease of the wilderness trained, 
gathering what pleased her fancy, but at the 
sound of Carlisle’s feet in the briers she whirled 
swiftly, poised at her full height in the fashion 
she had inherited from her father. 

In a flash Carlisle sensed the change in her! 
She was the same yet not the same woman as 
before her father’s revelation the night of their 
arrival on Sturgeon Lake. 


110 


AMBUSH 


That revelation seemed to have thrown her 
back on herself, stamped her more definitely 
as a Wayne. In the very accentuation of her 
father’s mannerism Carlisle read a strengthening 
of her loyalty to that father, and deep loyalty to 
Wayne could mean nothing but deep antagonism 
to him. 

With something of the same feeling he had 
experienced when he feared she was going to be 
absent from the congregation of the Pine Island 
Lake shore, he stopped before her without a 
greeting, searching her face with his eyes. 

“Paul, Paul,” she cried, peremptorily, first to 
break silence, “who gave you leave to follow me 
here?” 

“Nobody, but I took it,” he answered, boldly. 
“I took it, as men must always take the things 
they want in this Northland.” 

“But you had no right!” 

“Ah, but I have the right! A wood nymph 
came to me one night on the W T innipeg River and 
gave me that right. Do you remember?” 

“No, I don’t remember.” 

“Joan, you mean you don’t choose to re- 
member.” 

“Well, then — I don’t choose to remember!” 

Face to face with him she stood, defiant, im- 
perious, her arms full of the gathered wild 
flowers but shaming the flowers in all their fair- 
ness, far sweeter to Carlisle than the honeyed 
blossoms, far more haunting than the languorous 
perfume they breathed. 

“But you must. Joan!” he cried, almost 


TRADE WAR 


111 


fiercely. “You don’t hate me. In spite of all, 
you don’t hate me.” 

“There you’re wrong,” she flashed. “I do 
hate you. I hate you with my father’s hatred of 
your father, with his eternal loathing of a Car- 
lisle.” 

He leaned over till his eyes were close to hers, 
till he could catch every flicker of expression, 
every shade of emotion. 

“With his hatred,” he admitted, triumphantly, 
“but not with your own! Great heavens, Joan, 
I showed my feeling in the Rapide des Boisfranc, 
and you showed me yours in the teepee in the 
forest when you thought I was asleep. No — 
no — don’t say you didn’t. You can’t deceive 
me. I won’t take a thousand denials. You’re 
acting — acting a lie for your father’s sake. By 
the God of the Northmen, girl, you care!” 

“No! no! no, I don’t!” 

He laid his palms on the arms that hugged the 
bunch of tangled flowers. 

“You care!” he repeated, chokingly. 

“No, Paul, I ” 

The rest was lost in the swift sliding of his 
palms to her shoulders and the swifter crushing 
of herself against his great frame. 

“Stop, Paul, stop!” she implored, her face like 
a wild flower all sprayed with crimson among the 
crushed roses. “The blood of my mother stands 
between. And my father forbade me even to 
meet you on the trail. Let me go. If any of his 
men should come by and see!” 

“They’d see the truth, for you’re living a lie,” 


112 


AMBUSH 


he passionately persisted. “Tell me it’s a 
lie!” 

His caress was the elemental, soul-shaking 
caress that had swayed her in the caldron of the 
rapids, and with a little cry, Joan involuntarily 
tightened one arm upon his shoulders. 

“Yes, I lie — I do,” she panted. “And I shall 
go on lying — for my father’s sake, for my dead 
mother’s sake. I shall hate you day by day. 
Let me go ! Here, take the flowers, the bluebells 
for my eyes, the daisies for my hair, as my father 
says. 

“They’re all you’ll ever have of me. Take 
them. And, oh, Paul, no matter how I hate you, 
how I hurt you, remember that I he! There! 
There ! My God, what have I said — and done? ” 

She had forced the crushed flowers into his 
arms and, writhing free, darted through the 
saskatoon bushes into the fringe of trees that 
straggled ’round to Fort Wayne. 

A radiant light on his features, Carlisle looked 
down at the crushed, tangled armful of flowers 
she had left him. His vision was blurred, and he 
seemed to see them as her palpitant self, her 
longings crushed like the bruised petals upon her 
vow of parental devotion. He held the blooms 
tight as he moved away along the grassy hills, 
through the hollows and over the brake of fern to 
Cumberland House, and continually his eyes 
strayed to his fragrant burden. 

Lounging in the gateway of the stockade Galt 
and Drummond saw him coming and stared 
their surprise. 


TRADE WAR 


113 


“Ba gar, w’at’s dat he be got, Henry?” de- 
manded the brigade leader. 

“Flowers of the hills,” replied the keen-eyed 
half-breed. 

“ Certainement, dat’s right! Ha! Factor, you 
be peeck de bouquet for de post dis mornin’, eh? ” 

Carlisle looked up, startled. 

“ Oh — ah — yes, Eugene ! ” he returned. “ Th 9 
hills are covered with them. Did you ever see 
such shades? But they wilt quickly. And say, 
now that I think of it, is Cotameg about?” 

“De Chippewa canoeman? I’m t’ink he be 
gone on de lac. Oui , I’m remembaire heem say 
he be goin’ after w’itefish.” 

“Well, when he comes in, send him to me. I 
have a journey for him this afternoon.” 

“Oui,” assured Drummond, “soon’s I be set 
eyes on hees canoe!” 

The Factor passed on through the gate and up 
to his house, and the moment his back dis- 
appeared Eugene grasped the half-breed chief 
trader by the arm. 

“You be see it, Galt?” he chuckled. 

“No,” confessed Galt whose sight had failed 
him for once, “see what?” 

“He peeck dem, eh?” Eugene laughed, enig- 
matically. “For sure he peeck dem. An’ you 
ain’t see it? Ba gar, wound ’round de stems — 
forgotten? Wan dainty handkerchief, silk, all 
ovaire dat stinky smell — w’at you call it? — oui y 
perfume ! Diable , Galt, an’ dat’s strange flowaire 
for grow on de wild rose bush!” 


CHAPTER EIGHT 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 

At the moment Eugene Drummond was 
speaking of Cotameg as having gone on the lake, 
the Chippewa’s canoe was turning into Carcajou 
Cove up the Pine Island Lake shore not a great 
distance from Richelieu’s post. As Cotameg 
softly beached his craft over the rough shingle, 
the Northwest leader stepped out of the trees with 
a companion, a slim, smooth-cheeked Frenchman 
with a pointed moustache and a large hawk nose. 

“He is here, Dentaire,” observed Richelieu 
with satisfaction. “Par Dieu, never failing, 
never late — a spy of spies! Comment ?” 

“Yes, but what are you thinking of?” asked 
Dentaire. 

“Wait and see what I am thinking of, Den- 
taire,” laughed Richelieu. “Ha! Cotameg, 
what fable did you give this morning?” 

“I am seeking whitefish,” replied Cotameg 
without the trace of a grin, “and it will not do for 
me to be too long away. Also, I must not go 
back without some fish.” 

“All right, Cotameg, go on through the woods 
to the post. Robouix will give you money for 
your work, also rum, since it is a slack day and 
nothing to do.” 


114 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 


115 


With alacrity the Chippewa spy sped off 
through the trees, and the instant he was gone 
Richelieu seized upon the limp dunnage sack in 
the canoe, the sack which contained his meagre 
gear. 

“ Now, Dentaire, you will see what use I make 
of this tres vite” he announced. 

He shook the contents of the dunnage sack out 
into the underbrush and with the empty bag over 
his arm led the way a little distance ’round the 
curve of the cove and through the woods. Three 
hundred yards in, the deserted camp of White 
Loon, the smallpox-ridden Indian, and his rela- 
tives opened out before them, and Dentaire sud- 
denly realized where he was being led. 

“ Bon Dieu /” he ejaculated and crossed him- 
self in the trail. 

“ Diablement , Dentaire,” ridiculed Richelieu, 
“are you afraid of an old teepee?” 

“Bon Dieu I” repeated Dentaire, shivering, 
“teepees which chill one’s heart!” 

“Bah!” shrugged Richelieu. “They don’t 
chill my heart.” 

He walked fearlessly through the ashes of the 
camp-fire, kicking aside discarded cooking uten- 
sils and other paraphernalia, and peered into the 
opening of the torn skins that covered the teepee 
poles. 

His examination seemed to satisfy him, for, 
hanging the sack open-mouthed upon one of the 
poles, he picked up a long stick and began to 
fork into it things from the dark interior, worn 
moccasins, soiled trousers of buckskin, the dirty 


116 


AMBUSH 


parfleches or bed-rolls, while Dentaire, staring at 
him with horrified eyes, trembled and crossed 
himself and called incessantly on Providence. 

“Mort Rouge , the Red Death, the Indians call 
it,” grinned Richelieu as he pulled the bag down 
by the drawstrings in its mouth, jerked the 
strings tight, and started to drag it behind him. 
“ But never fear, Dentaire. This is not for you, 
though Providence would no doubt defend you 
from the plague with all that beseeching. It is 
for the men of the Hudson’s Bay.” 

“And, bon Dieu , does Cotameg know?” 
quavered Dentaire, taking frantic care to keep 
ahead all the way back to the cove. 

“No, you fool! Cotameg knows nothing 
about it. If he did he would be like you. del , 
he would run or drop the bag in the lake. Since 
he knows nothing he will go back and throw the 
bag down as usual in Cumberland House — like 
I do now!” 

With a tug and swing on the drawstrings 
Richelieu tossed the dunnage sack carelessly into 
the canoe bow. 

“With never a touch of my hands!” he 
boasted. “ But calm yourself, Dentaire, and quit 
your crossing. I think I hear Cotameg coming 
back. See that you give no suspicion to him.” 

Shortly the Chippewa appeared, walking more 
noisily, with less of his stony stoicism what with 
the rum with which Robouix under Richelieu’s 
instructions had plied him. He had half a 
dozen whitefish in his hands, and, grinning, he 
held them out. 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 


117 


“Robouix’s men caught many to-day,” he 
explained. “And I have wasted time. These 
will save me time.” 

“Yes,” Richelieu nodded, “take them quickly. 
They will not starve to-day at Cumberland 
House. And when the Factor sends for his 
supplies, do not fail to give me word or sign.” 

Cotameg threw the whitefish into the stern of 
his canoe, paddled out of Carcajou Cove, and 
swung back to Cumberland House. He had 
been absent the greater part of the morning. 
Several times Carlisle had asked Drummond if 
he had returned, and now as his craft came in 
sight, the brigade leader went up to the Factor’s 
house. 

“De Chippewa be cornin’,” he informed. 

“All right, Eugene. Bring me Smoking Pine 
to the beach. I am sending the two of them to 
the Pas for foodstuffs. I don’t like the post to 
be too long on a straight meat diet. It breeds 
disease.” 

When Eugene found Smoking Pine, Carlisle 
followed them down to the shore where the 
Chippewa was edging in his canoe. 

“You needn’t trouble to land, Cotameg,” 
the Factor told him. “Your being away has 
made your start late. Step in, Smoking Pine. 
No — keep the fish. They’ll make your first 
meal, for you’ll have to feed yourselves on the 
way. Go to the Pas. Tell Lewis to send on 
the York boats from his post. If the boats 
aren’t there, wait for them, and see that there is 
no delay on the river.” 


118 


AMBUSH 


Though the rum was in his veins, Cotameg 
had wisdom enough to show no concern. He 
grunted comprehendingly and dipped his paddle 
in time with Smoking Pine’s as the canoe glided 
off, but a mile or two upon his way he stopped for 
the noon meal just near one of the secret rendez- 
vous that he and Richelieu had picked upon to 
obviate the risk of his visiting the Northwest 
post too often. 

There they roasted some of the fish on sticks, 
and there Cotameg lagged behind Smoking Pine a 
moment before he stalked down to the canoe to 
reembark. 

With his knife he blazed a white space upon a 
tree trunk in the secret rendezvous and with a 
piece of charcoal from the fire smudged on it the 
sign for Richelieu, — a crude drawing of a full flour 
sack labelled H. B. C. 

Nor was the departure of Cotameg and Smok- 
ing Pine the only departure from Cumberland 
House that day. After the mid-day meal, 
seemingly without fore-thought, without any 
definite plan, the Indian hunters took down the 
medicine bags from the rear of their teepees and 
the squaws struck the tents. 

The tribes ’round Richelieu’s post and Fort 
Wayne perceived the exodus and followed suit. 
The littered camp grounds became a chaos and a 
bedlam of bucks, squaws, children, and dogs, but 
finally the ruck was straightened out, the bag- 
gage bundled and apportioned, the papooses and 
curs sorted, and the pilgrimage began. 

Their destinations were many, the up-Sas- 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 


119 


katchewan country, the down-Saskatchewan, the 
Sturgeon River, the Carrot River, the eastern 
and western arms of Sturgeon Lake, Lakes 
Namew, Amisk, Goose, Athapuscow! 

Some went afoot on the forest trails, their 
worldly goods piled upon their shoulders and 
their dogs back-packed with forty pounds apiece. 
Others travelled by canoe, the glistening yellow 
craft loaded to the gunwales with heterogeneous 
dunnage and the dogs thrust under the thwarts. 

The serried hosts of the forest trees swallowed 
the files of marchers more quickly than the 
sweeping phalanxes of the crested waves could 
hide the fleets. From the doorway of his house 
Carlisle watched the familiar sight. They were 
going back, these children of the wilderness, to 
their wilderness crafts, to their fish channels, 
caribou runs, and trap lines. 

They would travel from fifty to one hundred 
miles from Cumberland House, planting their 
marten deadfalls, their double-spring fox traps, 
their twitch-up snares for rabbits through a waste 
of frost and snow, and he would see none of them 
again till Christmas. 

W ith a strange sense of loneliness he held them 
to the last with his keen eyes, till the straight 
backs of the hunters, the bright shawls of the 
squaws, the warm yellow of the birch canoes 
faded beyond the heaving silver rollers. 

A fortnight passed after their departure, and 
there was no sign of the York boats at Cumber- 
land House. The month of September came in, 
and still Carlisle felt no uneasiness. For Cota- 


no 


AMBUSH 


meg and Smoking Pine had to go down ’round 
the Great Bend of the Saskatchewan, beyond the 
mouth of the Carrot to the Pasquia River where 
the post of the Pas lay in the crotch the Pasquia 
formed with the Saskatchewan. 

Perhaps the supplies had not reached Lewis 
when they got there! Perhaps on account of 
pack ice or shifting shoals in James Bay the 
company’s ship had not been able to get in on 
schedule, and there might have been delay in 
sending the York boats up from York Factory. 

So the Factor waited philosophically, living 
like the rest of the men of the post, and the rival 
posts as well, upon a straight meat diet varied a 
little by berries from the hills. Daily they plied 
the rifle and the net, bringing in the first fall 
ducks, ptarmigan whose brown summer feather- 
ing was whitening for winter, finny prizes from 
the cool deep waters, whitefish, inconnu, silvery 
trout as big as salmon, sometimes a weighty 
sturgeon. 

Surplus fish, especially the whitefish, were 
dried for winter dog feed, and when the nets 
yielded nothing the canoes went out at night 
with spearmen in the bows, bronze statues posing 
under the red flares in the iron baskets above 
them, darting their steel into the pitchy, flame- 
carmined water where the startled fish fluked in 
phosphorescent streaks. 

Bird life, too, was flocking for the fall mi- 
gration. Plover, snipe, terns, long-billed marsh 
wrens, yellow-headed blackbirds, red-winged 
blackbirds, Sora rails filled the reedy labyrinths. 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 121 

Wood duck, ruddy duck, grebes, loons, coots, 
mallards, black duck covered the weedy channels, 
while day by day the rafts of gadwall, pintail, 
teal, scaups, scoters, redheads, canvasbacks grew 
greater and greater. 

Then down drove the wedges of wild geese, 
true harbingers of coming winter, the Canadas 
from Hudson’s Bay, the wavies from unknown 
islands of the Arctic. Every day from sunrise 
to sunset the guns of the Indian goose hunters 
talked on the lonely shores, and by the hundreds 
they brought them in, to be eaten fresh or salted 
down in barrels for winter use. 

But white men quickly sicken of flesh alone 
and white women more quickly than men, and 
often Carlisle wondered how Joan was faring on 
the savage diet. He had not seen her since the 
Sunday morning she had fled from him. Her 
flowers were withered and dead, but he looked in 
vain for another meeting. All the week days 
there was practically no communication between 
the posts and on Sundays she never came any 
more to Andrews’ mixed services on the lake 
shore. 

He wondered if she were ill, and censured him- 
self for pressing the trade war so bitterly. W ould 
Wayne perhaps save some staple provisions for 
such an emergency? But on second thought he 
knew Wayne was not the man to hedge in a fight. 
She would be living on the post diet, and he 
feared it did not agree. 

The idea harassed him continually, set him 
searching at nights f™* overlooked food among 


AMBUSH 


122 

the shelves of his quarters till one night he came 
across his gear bag, thrown aside and forgotten 
since he had established himself at the post. 

In its bottom his groping fingers felt a bundle 
which he did not recognize at first but as he un- 
rolled the oilcloth in which it was wrapped he 
suddenly remembered about it. It was a small 
reserve of provisions, stowed away there when 
he left Moose Factory in case of accident or 
emergency on the trip to Cumberland House. 

Eagerly he spread out its contents and eyed 
the articles with satisfaction — a tiny bag of 
flour, the same of meal, a tin of salted butter, a 
package of raisins, a little powdered chocolate. 
Delicacies for any one in the North, a boon to Joan 
whether she was sick or not! And who was to 
see him if he tossed them by night over the pali- 
sades of Fort Wayne? 

Hastily he wrapped them up again in strong 
paper, wrote Joan’s name on the wrapper, 
slipped out of his house and through the stockade 
gate. 

The moment he left the stockade he caught 
it — the first tang of real autumn, that indefinable 
feel in the air, something of coolness, something 
of dampness, a savour of falling leaves, white 
frost fogs, mournful winds, and a world left 
desolate by fleeting migrant wings. The moon 
was nearly full, ghost-like, gibbous, pouring its 
radiance over the blackly silhouetted tree-tops 
upon Pine Island Lake beneath. 

A flux of molten silver Carlisle beheld the 
waters, broken only by the swimming muskrats 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 123 

at the apices of their V-shaped ripples along the 
shores and by the huge rafts of ducks, huddled 
black as islands, quacking sleepily in mid-lake. 
Shore and open forest aisles were bright as day, 
so the Factor edged into the trees and kept the 
shadows as he worked round to Fort W ayne. 

Velvet-footed on his moccasins he approached 
the palisades, maintaining a sharp watch for 
riflemen who might fire first and challenge after- 
ward, measuring his distance till he thought he 
was near enough to throw. As he swung back 
his arm, the creak of the opening stockade gate 
froze him in his tracks, and the next instant a 
woman’s figure came flying round the palisades 
on the trail that led to the water’s edge, almost 
colliding with him before she could come to a stop. 

“Joan!” 

“Paul!” 

“Where on earth were you going, girl, at this 
time of night?” 

“Hush, Paul!” she whispered. “Murdock, 
the gate-keeper, or some of the others may hear 
you. Wfliat on earth are you doing yourself, 
here, under our palisades?” 

“Tell me where you were going, first,” he 
insisted. 

“I was going to the lake. I — I have not been 
feeling too well lately!” 

“Ha, I knew it! It’s the meat diet. I found 
some other food in my packs and was going to 
toss it over for you. Here it is.” 

He thrust the package into her hands, his eyes 
full of tender solicitude as they studied her face 


124 


AMBUSH 


in the moonlight, a face not so full of its laughing 
curves, not so rose-fresh in colour as it should 
have been. 

“You’ve been sick, sicker than you’ve ad- 
mitted,” he diagnosed. 

“I’ve been worrying — that’s the main 
trouble,” she told him. “I’m all upset. It’s 
about my father, Paul, his supplies. He got 
word back from the independent posts, and none 
of them can spare anything. They’ve had their 
trade wars, too.” 

“Of course!” Carlisle exclaimed. “You 
didn’t suppose mine was an isolated attempt, did 
you? The Hudson’s Bay Company’s making 
a timed and concerted effort all over the West to 
smash competition with one stroke, and the key 
point of the whole campaign lies right here. 
That’s why it pinches hardest. If I fail, every- 
thing fails. 

“By heaven, Joan, do you think I carry my 
responsibility lightly? Do you think it’s easy 
for me to starve you, to make you suffer? But, 
girl, you won’t force me to that cruelty, will 
you? Tell me, if things come to the worst, that 
you’ll persuade your father to give in.” 

“Never, Paul, never!” she refused, passion- 
ately. “Before you break his independence, 
you’ll have to break him — and me!” 

“Ha, you mad girl! Then if you will face 
hunger, you’ll have to let me send you stuff like 
that in your hands.” 

“Perhaps, Paul — that is, if you have it to 
send,” she smiled, enigmatically. 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 125 

“What does that mean? Is it a riddle? Do 
you promise?” 

“I’ll give you my promise if you give me yours.” 

“But there’s no necessity for me to promise. 
Are you laughing at me, warning me, or ” 

He stopped in mid-sentence, twisting his head 
swiftly at the roar of a wild commotion at 
Cumberland House. He caught the thud of 
moccasined feet running and the shrill tenor 
voice of Eugene Drummond pitched on the night: 

“Factor, Factor!” he was yelling. “ Mon 
Dieu ! w’ere you be disappear an’ gone den? 
De York boats be on de shore an’ dere’s diable 
trouble makin’. Fur men fightin’ de crews an” 
Smoking Pine be run for help ! Factor — Factor ! ’ * 

“Here, Eugene!” roared Carlisle, forgetful of 
Murdock or anybody else. “I’m coming!” 

As he whirled about he found Joan blocking 
the trail, the moonlight glinting on a pistol in her 
hand. 

“Stay right where you are, Paul,” she com- 
manded. 

“Joan — your father’s men!” Carlisle ex- 
claimed intuitively. 

He leaped suddenly, making a swift pass with 
his hand to grasp her arm, but, agile as a fawn, 
she sprang back and evaded him. 

“Paul, I’ll shoot,” she threatened. “As sure 
as I hold it, I’ll shoot!” 

The pistol muzzle covered him fairly, daunting, 
deadly. For a minute or so Carlisle hesitated, 
searching her eyes for any sign of uncertainty, of 
yielding, but he read only determination there. 


126 


AMBUSH 


I 

A will that matched his own she showed, and its 
antagonism fired him with a sterner resolve. 
With a lightning movement he launched himself 
bodily upon her, pistol and all. He had her 
grasped by the shoulders, but the weapon 
touched his breast. 

‘‘Paul,” she cried, breathlessly, “ don’t make 
me ” 

Then in the crucial moment her will failed. 
With a little cry of despair she thrust the weapon 
back into her pocket and swept her arms about 
his neck. 

Carlisle’s strong frame trembled from head to 
foot. For mad moments he knew nothing there 
in the trail, saw nothing but the spun-gold hair, 
the amethyst eyes, and the passionate face 
touched to his under the moonlight — till through 
the cloying sweetness of his oblivion rang the 
raucous clamour of men fighting on the shore. 
Her arms still clinging, he tore himself free and 
dashed back toward Cumberland House. 

As he reached the stockade gate out shot 
Eugene Drummond, his raven hair dishevelled 
and streaming, his volatile face ridged in con- 
sternation, and his black eyes glinting fire in his 
excitement. 

“Name of le diable /” he shouted. “I’m be 
hunt you everyw’ere, Factor. Smokin’ Pine ” 

“ I know,” blurted Carlisle, guiltily. “I heard 
you. Come on. Have you routed out the 
men?” 

“ Mon Dieu , oui /” exploded Eugene, catching 
him by the arm. “Some in deir shirts half- 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 


127 


naked, some snorin’ in peeg sleep. An dose 
York boats’ crews fightin’ off t’ree taims deir 
number!” 

The rest of his frenzied declamation was lost 
upon Carlisle, who, tearing his arm free and 
distancing Eugene, was bounding down to the 
lake edge in great, long strides. Already he 
could see the York boats, three in number, sweep- 
ing-lined, long-prowed, eight-oared crafts, so 
huge as to be capable of holding one hundred 
bags of flour. 

They lay black as logs along the shore, and 
over them, poised on the gunwales, running 
along the seats, trampling the cargoes, raged and 
surged a mob of fighting men. Even at that 
distance the Factor recognized the attackers as 
Free-Traders, Wayne’s men of the Missouri, 
men of the Mississippi, men of the Red, all 
mingled with his Creeand Chippewayan Indians. 

He sawt he brown-bearded, long-jawed Mason 
war-whooping his way through his opponents, 
and in the centre of the melee he caught a glimpse 
of Wayne, towering to his great height, his 
copper-coloured moustache flashing golden in the 
moonlight as he wrenched and struck. 

The York boats’ crews fought back with the 
oars and the long poles they had used for poling 
up the rapids, but Wayne’s force was too large 
for their meagre numbers. Before Carlisle could 
reach the waterline the Free-Traders had 
swarmed over the York boats from stern to 
prow, pulled, dragged, knocked the crews over- 
side into the shallow water and seized the oars. 


AMBUSH 


ns 

Then, under the Factor’s astounded eyes, 
another force struck the victors like a thunder- 
bolt. All in a second the shore thickets gushed 
men, the very rocks of the earth seemed to spew 
them. One moment they were not, the next 
moment they were, as if borne up on the oscilla- 
tions of an earthquake or the breath of a tornado. 
Northwesters all, outnumbering Wayne’s force as 
W ayne’s had outnumbered the York boats’ crews. 

In hiding from the first, their rush, timed to 
the fraction of a second, caught the Free- 
Traders in the moment of disadvantage, just 
in the act of replacing the oars in the locks. 
Carlisle could see that the Northwesters had a 
stout cable in their hands, stretched taut as a 
rod, a score of men on either end. W ith a surge 
and splash they hurled themselves through the 
shallows, and like a giant scythe the taut cable 
cleared the York boats at one stroke, sweeping 
the Free-Traders overside like manikins from 
their perch. 

In a flash the cable was lashed onto the leading 
boat, the other boats lashed onto the first, and 
already the flotilla was being towed rapidly to- 
ward Richelieu’s post. As well as being equipped 
with a land-gate, the Northwest fort boasted a 
water-gate, part of the stockade extending out 
over the water, enclosing a little harbour entered 
through a heavy log barrier that was raised by 
ropes on capstan-like drums inside. 

Carlisle saw that the water-gate stood open 
and that it was Richelieu’s plan to slide the York 
boats, cargoes and all, inside his palisades. He 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 1%9 

marked the Northwest leader at the head of the 
trackers, pulling, exhorting, cursing the clumsy. 

‘‘Name of a name, is it a hearse, then? And 
par DieuI do not fall over your own feet. Quick! 
Quick! Straight ahead, and the sooner the 
better!” 

With an imprecation Carlisle took a running 
leap from the shore, Drummond, Galt, Smoking 
Pine, and the straggle of Cumberland House men 
launching after, backed up by the dripping York 
boats’ crews. He landed with a geyser-like 
splash among the knot of trackers, grappling 
with the cursing Richelieu, his feet slipping upon 
the shelving rock. Together they went down 
in the shallows, rolling and wrenching. Half-a- 
dozen men fell on top of them. The boats, never 
stopping in their career, bumped them aside, and 
in the scramble Carlisle’s grip was torn from 
Richelieu. 

He found his footing again and staggered up, 
but as he emerged from the water a flying oar 
blade caught him on the side of the head, knock- 
ing him, half -stunned, across the gunwale of one 
of the boats. In a daze he felt himself dragged 
along, half in half out of the water. All about 
him surged shouting, snarling tangles of men, 
black as demons against the silver moonlight, 
his own adherents striking and tearing at the 
towers on the ropes, hacking at the lashings them- 
selves, while the Northwesters fended them off. 

Occasionally a rifle spat out, but at too close 
quarters for indiscriminate shooting, in a maze 
where they hardly discerned friend from enemy, 


130 


AMBUSH 


the Hudson’s Bay men smote with clubbed rifles, 
pieces of broken oars, rocks, knives, axes. Yet 
despite the weight of their attack the York boats 
were sliding foot by foot toward Richelieu’s 
water-gate. 

Within a few hundred feet of it Carlisle pulled 
himself up once more with a resurge of strength 
and cast himself into the fray. Knocking men 
right and left, he seized the last boat by the stern 
and with all the mighty power of his body swung 
it sidewise toward the shore. 

“ Eugene! Galt!” he importuned. “Any of 
you there — hold the bows!” 

His idea was to turn the flotilla broadside on so 
that it could not enter the water-gate and thus 
delay it till more reinforcements could arrive 
from Cumberland House. Without a doubt 
the manoeuvre would have been successful had it 
not been for the length of the Northwesters’ 
cable. 

The loose end of it had been seized by men in 
the water-gate and whipped round one of the 
capstan-like drums inside. Others threw them- 
selves on the bars, and with a wrench and run the 
flotilla was torn bodily from the hands of Carlisle 
and his companions and snaked through the 
water-gate. 

The heavy log barrier dropped with a rumble 
and splash, and a loud cheer burst from the vic- 
torious Northwesters within. Still cheering, 
they ran to the palisades, and the hail of their 
bullets began to splat-splat in the shallows un- 
comfortably close to Carlisle and the rest. 


THE PRICE OF A KISS 


131 


It was madness to crouch there in the moon- 
light, black targets for guns behind log walls. 
The Hudson’s Bay men paused only long enough 
hurriedly to shoulder their wounded and disabled 
and broke into a run for Cumberland House. 

As Carlisle lurched along in the rear he could 
discern the baffled Free-Traders off toward Fort 
Wayne, making for their own stockade. By 
his great height he marked Wayne among them 
and close beside Wayne the shimmer of Joan’s 
dress. Well, he read her riddle now. But her 
need was not yet satisfied. Richelieu had won! 

In the trading-room of Cumberland House the 
panting Hudson’s Bay men let down their bur- 
dens under the candlelight: the lifeless Chip- 
pewa, Cotameg, shot fairly through the head; 
two wounded white men of the post with bullets 
through their thighs; three men of the York 
boats’ crews with splintered bones in their arms 
or legs. 

Hardly a man was there but showed the marks 
of the battle, cracked heads, smashed knuckles, 
flesh wounds and bruises without end, and as 
they felt each other over to make sure there was 
no more serious hurt, Father Andrews appeared 
in the doorway. 

Roused from sleep by the commotion, his cas- 
sock only half -belted on by its cord, he came; and 
at his entrance Eugene Drummond, wiping the 
blood from his swarthy face, dropped his hand- 
kerchief with an amazed exclamation. 

“ Ba gar !” he whispered, hoarsely, “ hees face — 
liees face for sure!” 


182 


AMBUSH 


Andrews in his hurry had forgotten his mos- 
quito veil, and for the first time in twenty-one 
years Drummond saw his features. Yet he saw 
them only for an instant and then only in the 
semi-obscurity of the doorway. Eugene’s ex- 
clamation struck the priest like a warning word. 

His hand went up and drew close the cowl of 
his cassock before he stepped from the threshold 
into the fuller light of the candles. Though 
the veil was not there, the shadow of the cowl 
lay dark across his features. Drummond could 
read them no longer. 

“In the name of Heaven, what’s been going 
on, Paul?” demanded Andrews. “What have 
you done?” 

“Done?” echoed Carlisle, grimly. “Brought 
you a corpse and some patients, Father. You’ll 
have to bury Cotameg and look after the others 
well while I’m away.” 

“ Away ? ” echoed the priest in his turn. “ What 
do you mean?” 

He took a step after Carlisle as the latter, 
unanswering, passed out through the trading- 
room doorway. 

“Are you leaving Cumberland House, then, 
Paul?” he asked. 

“Yes,” Carlisle told him, “I’m going down 
river for the rest of my York boats.” 

“Oh! The ones from the Pas came on, eh? 
That was the cause of the fighting? ” 

“Yes, they came, three of them, Andrews, 
and — I sold them for a kiss!” 


CHAPTER NINE 


MUTINY 

Lewis, his craggy face puckered in bewilder- 
ment, stared long at the canoe gliding in to his 
post of the Pas. It was the Factor’s craft, all 
right. He could recognize Waseyawin and Mis- 
sowa, bowsman and steersman, and the four 
middlemen as well, and there was Carlisle him- 
self amidships with Eugene Drummond by his 
side. Yet why were they here? It was not in 
accordance with the outlined plans or the issued 
orders. Something had happened. Something 
had gone wrong. Lewis tugged at his gray beard 
and muttered a wondering monologue till the 
Factor was close enough to hail him. 

“Well, Lewis, how is it with everything here 
at the Pas?” 

“Nae mon wull bother me, ye ken, Factor,” 
replied Lewis. “I ha’ done well wi’ the trade, 
an’ I maun no be complainin’. An’ yersel’? 
Wha’ aboot the York boats? Had they ony 
trouble gettin’ up?” 

“No, but lots of trouble when they got there. 
Richelieu has them now, cargoes and all, and 
I’m bound down for the others.” 

“The deil! An’ ye are sayin’ so, Factor? 
But wull ye no be stoppin’ a bit?” 

133 


134 


AMBUSH 


“No — no time,” refused Carlisle, sheering off 
again. “I just wanted to let you know. Keep 
a tight hand, Lewis. I’ll see you again on the 
way back!” 

On down the river the huge canoe leaped, 
flinging its miles behind, winding round its in- 
terminable curves to Chimawawin lying where 
the Saskatchewan broadened into Cedar Lake, 
but Hampton had no boats there. 

“Us hasn’t larned aught about them from 
Jarvis, Factor,” was his report to Carlisle. “Not 
likely they corned across the lake yet or it’s a 
very mistaken judgment I has.” 

So they were off again down Cedar Lake 
through the Narrows, past the Demie Charge 
Rapids, past the Roche Rouge Rapids to the 
Grand Rapids post. Here the Saskatchewan, 
watering a vast empire in its long journey from 
the Rockies, poured at last into Lake Winnipeg, 
and here Jarvis had the same report as Hampton. 
Only three York boats had crossed the lake, the 
three that had gone on to the Pas. 

Jarvis couldn’t tell the cause of the delay. 
They might be still on the river, or they might 
be moored at Norway House waiting for favour- 
able weather to cross. Jarvis did not know. 
He would not know till they arrived. 

“But strike me blind in the blinkers if they 
ayn’t put Heskimos or some other God-fors’yken 
copper-skins on for crews ! ” he prophesied. “ ’Cos 
w’y should it tyke them this long to reach ’ere? 
Cawn’t come fine and dry ! Have to wait for the 
dirty rain and blows. We ’aven’t but three 


MUTINY 135 

seasons ’ere anyw’y, Factor — July, Haugust 
and winter!” 

Carlisle would have continued on across the 
lake to Norway House, but the October rains 
and gales were on and the Winnipeg was too 
dangerous at the moment for canoe travel. 
Perforce he fretted away the days at Grand 
Rapids, ever watching for the lift of the York 
boats through the squalls. The breath of win- 
ter blew frostily down the vast inland sea. 

All the forest was a dying blaze of colour, 
cardinal-leafed moose maples, yellow birches, 
canary willows, umber cottonwoods, silvered 
poplars, burning brightly against the sere grasses 
of the gulches and the purple-black spruce of the 
hills. Then a weird storm with thunder, light- 
ning, hail, sleet quenched the flame in a night, 
and the next morning the forests were stripped 
to their swaying trunks and moaning branches. 

Stark as a skeleton lay the land, with the sifting 
snow padding its bare ribs and ragged vertebrae 
like leprous flesh. The flowers were swept from 
the hills. No longer Carlisle saw in the dance 
of bluebells Joan’s laughing eyes; no longer he 
caught in the breeze-blown daisies the golden 
shimmer of her hair. He cursed the laggard 
York boats and wore out his eyes trying to 
pierce Winnipeg’s wrack of storm. 

The lake raged incessantly, a winter-harrowed 
maelstrom, its headlands hidden by the break- 
ing waves, its islands frost-armoured over, its 
beach littered with shore ice broken off and 
cast high like chips, its three hundred miles of 


136 


AMBUSH 


rollers ramping to the clouds, roaring at the mi- 
grant rout scudding through the snow. 

“ Ae, Factor, it is not Wenipak now,” described 
Waseyawin who with Missowa always watched 
at his shoulder. “It is Keche (the ocean) Weni- 
pak” 

“So,” nodded Missowa, “but in three days 
the wind will lose its breath. The air will be 
sweet and warm.” 

“Indian summer, eh, Missowa?” asked Car- 
lisle. 

“Thus the white men call it, but it is not of 
this earth. It comes from afar, from another 
world. It is the time when the spirits of our 
forefathers rise to go forth on the winter hunt, 
and in that time of calm, Factor, your boats will 
arrive.” 

Missowa ’s words proved true. In three days 
the wind seemed to have blown out its lungs. 
The earth poised in a vacuum through which 
stole mellow lights, a haze of incense, chatter of 
birds, droning of bees, the gurgle of running 
rapids. The snow steamed on the slopes, and 
the river ice pooled with black water, when all in 
one fleet, manned by York Factory Indians and 
steered by half-breeds, out of the dank lake 
vapour the York boats rose like hoary ghost 
craft. 

There had been a forest fire on the Hayes 
after the routing of the first boats up, they 
said, and these later ones had been forced 
to clear the stream of miles of half-burned 
trees. 


MUTINY 


137 


Carlisle was ready for them. When the 
passing of the autumn season showed him 
that there was no hope of getting the car- 
goes up-river by boat, he had made ready 
his toboggans, dog teams, snowshoes and 
all his winter gear. Now the transfer from 
boats to dog teams was arranged. Before 
all was completed the weather changed again. 

Some invisible hand loosed the leash that 
held the wind, opened the snowgates of the sky. 
The frosts bit like the stroke of steel. Ahead 
lay a foot of river and lake ice covered with sand- 
like drifts. 

At Chimawawin the Factor drew on Hampton 
for a fresh relay of men, dogs, and toboggans and 
sent the first relay back to Grand Rapids to 
bring on the surplus stuff he had been com- 
pelled to leave behind for lack of outfits. At 
the Pas he repeated, sending back both relays, 
and out of the Pas on the home trail he marshalled 
a long train of toboggans each drawn by six hus- 
kies and loaded with one thousand pounds 
apiece. 

With a surge of joy he turned his face up 
stream on the final relay. It was the com- 
pany’s business, but his heart was not in it. 
His heart was up yonder on Sturgeon Lake 
where a mad girl would have finished by this 
time the food he had surreptitiously given her 
and no doubt be pining for more! 

Of a truth, Joan was pining for more. Like 
medicine in her blood the provisions Carlisle 
had given her brought back the roses to her 


138 


AMBUSH 


cheeks, but it was only for a little, and when the 
delicacies were done she failed more rapidly 
than before. Worry aided malnutrition. 

The failure to capture the Hudson’s Bay 
Company’s York boats chagrined her and her 
father beyond measure. For Wayne’s attempt 
was no mere hostile raid. It was a serious 
venture forced by the dire need of better sus- 
tenance, and the fact that Richelieu had out- 
witted them as well as Carlisle was bitter as 
hemlock drink. 

Wayne brooded over it continually, and 
his brooding finally brought him to a reluctant 
decision. 

“By the Doom, Joan, I’ll have to send you 
out,” he told her, his eyes dwelling longingly 
upon her. “We’ve never been separated be- 
fore, but I think the time has come. It’s too 
late now to get you out by canoe, but on the 
first snow I’ll send you with Mason by dog team 
to St. Paul.” 

“No, no, Father,” Joan passionately pro- 
tested. “I can’t leave you here alone. I 
couldn’t bear it alone at St. Paul. I’ll fight 
it out with you. Oh! My dear, I want to. 
I must. I will. There,” laughing her old 
gay laugh as she cast herself into his arms, 
“there’s your defiant daughter, sir! But don’t 
worry. I’ll be all right, Father. Let us both be 
cheerful. I’m sure something unexpected will 
turn up.” 

She had no communication with Cumber- 
land House and knew nothing of the Hud- 


MUTINY 


139 


son’s Bay Company’s plans, for since the battle 
over the York boats the tension had tightened 
about all three posts and rivalry had grown more 
bitter. The gates were always closed now and a 
watch kept upon the palisades. 

Antagonism flared openly. The woods were 
full of surprises. By night daring raiders dashed 
out trying to put torch to their enemies’ stock- 
ades. By day sharp skirmishes occurred. Wood- 
gathering parties were put to flight and hunters 
fired at on lonely forest trails. 

Yet never in those eventful days had Joan 
seen or heard anything of Carlisle. She won- 
dered at his seclusion, his silence. Perhaps he 
had been unable to secure more supplies for 
himself! But in any event he had intimated 
that he would not forget her if she were in need, 
and though she was not just sure that her pride 
would let her accept, nevertheless she resented 
the absence of any overture. 

The weeks passed without any sign from 
him, the geese went south, the snow fell, and 
the frost crackled. Her indisposition increased 
day by day. To the observant Wayne her 
trouble seemed threefold — the disturbing effect 
of the straight meat diet, the brooding over the 
Free-Trade prospects, and an apparent canker, 
heart-longing, for which he could find no reason. 
Casting about for a reason, his mind turned upon 
Carlisle. 

As a magnanimous enemy he had brought 
her food to the palisades, food which Wayne 
in a wrath was prone to throw away had it 


140 


AMBUSH 


not been for the girl’s actual need. Was he 
more than a magnanimous enemy? Wayne 
recalled the intimacy between him and Joan 
during the earlier part of the canoe journey from 
Grande Portage, also the fact that, together, 
they had voyaged the latter part of it without 
him. 

Foreboding entered into him. Perhaps it 
was not worry, not dangerous diet he had to 
fear most! Perhaps something else was eating 
her youthful health away, the consuming desire 
of the void spaces of her heart, the emaciating 
hunger of her soul — a hunger he himself had 
suffered all these years. 

“You had better let me send over to Cumber- 
land House for Father Andrews,” he suggested. 
“He’s skilled with medicines, and no doubt 
he’ll be able to give you something to help you.” 

“No, Father, no, you mustn’t,” she flashed 
with genuine fire. “We ask nothing of the 
Hudson’s Bay Company, and if word passes 
between the posts it must come first from 
Cumberland House.” 

Still her sickness persisted, and Wayne cursed 
the eternal, nauseating, gorge-raising meat. It 
was affecting even his iron self. It was affecting 
all his men. He had disconcerting visions 
of scurvy and plague, and he told Mason to 
see that the men brewed spruce tea and drank it 
as a preventive. But the men had long been 
muttering among themselves, brewing a draft of 
trouble. 

They grumbled at their fare, grumbled at the 


MUTINY 


141 


spruce tea, and, when no one was looking, threw it 
in the snow. They had not bargained, they told 
each other, to live through the winter eating 
each day three meals of flesh and flesh alone, 
all for the sake of the Indians’ trade. 

They knew that if they went out fifty or 
one hundred miles to the Indians’ teepees in 
their hunting districts and took back what 
supplies they needed, they would stir the tribes 
to bloodshed and kill Wayne’s trade and prestige 
at one stroke, but this they violently threatened 
to do. Straight meat was all right for Eskimos 
and pagan Indians, they stormed, but they had 
been born in the South ! 

Had Wayne not been so preoccupied with his 
daughter’s condition, he would have marked the 
fermentation of discontent, the progression of 
discontent to open mutiny, but he spent most 
of his time with Joan, who, lapsing from her 
usual vigorous activity, lay listless and tired 
upon a couch by the fireplace in his council-room. 
Through the shortening winter days and the 
ever-lengthening nights he would sit smoking 
by her side, staring at the pale face upon the 
black bearskin couch-robes, racking his brains 
for a way out of the situation, pleading with her 
in vain to let him get medicines or send her 
south. 

Mason warned him once that he feared the 
men might get out of hand, and he promised to 
look into the matter, but the warning slipped 
from his mind in the treacherous fashion things 
had been slipping of late. He never remem- 


142 


AMBUSH 


bered it till his brigade leader stalked in on him 
and Joan one wintry dusk with the news that 
the men had not come back that afternoon from 
their fuel-gathering. 

Rudely shaken out of his thinking and brood- 
ing, Wayne leaped up, mentally alert, poised 
at his full height as if scented danger had put 
him on his guard. 

“How’s that, Mason?” he demanded. “How 
long have they been away? When’d they leave 
the post?” 

“ JisUat noon, Wayne, and I’m sartinly gittin’ 
anxious.” 

“But# maybe they’re working late, Mason; 
maybe they’ve had a brush with Northwesters 
or Hudson’s Bay choppers and are lying low to 
get in under cover of the dark.” 

The Missourian shook his head, his weather- 
wrinkled, alkali-seared face creasing deeper in 
his anxiety. 

“Mebbe so,” he doubted, “but thar ain’t the 
ring of an axe or the spit of a rifle to be heerd. 
The woods is as still as a cussed vault.” 

“No noise, eh?” pondered Wayne. “That’s 
suspicious. By the Doom, Mason, if they’re 
trying to play me tricks. I’ll have the skins of the 
whole crowd! How many are left in the Fort?” 

“You, me, Murdock, and three more.” 

“Well, tell Murdock and the three to stand 
keen watch. You and I’ll go out and find them.” 

“Oh! Don’t leave me here alone, Father,” 
pleaded Joan, sliding off the couch and glancing 
apprehensively at the winter dark on the win- 


MUTINY 


143 


dow-pane, at the sombre shadows of the room. 
“Take me with you. I don’t know what’s the 
matter with me, but I’m all nerves, and I can’t 
stay here alone.” 

“All right, Joan,” he humoured her. “It’s 
not very far. Put on something warm and 
come with us.” 

Over her blanket-cloth suit she slipped her 
warmest capote, beautifully cased in ermine 
with the edge of the hood fringed with tails of 
the silver fox. She thrust her moccasined toes 
into the loops of her tasselled snowshoes and 
passed out between her father and Mason over 
the soft snows into the woods. Shuffling with- 
out a sound they went, Wayne and Mason on 
their broad bear’s-paw shoes, their rifles thrown 
across their left arms in readiness. 

Around them crept the eeriness of the winter 
night, deep shadow in the underbrush, a half 
twilight in the open aisles, the snow’s refraction 
of the starlight filtering through the festooned 
branches. 

The forest was a fairyland filled with fantastic 
shapes, a strange cathedral packed with voiceless 
worshippers standing, white-robed, huddled upon 
their knees, or lying prone upon their hidden 
faces; and over all, like the shroud of the dead, 
spread the everlasting snow, cloaked on the tree 
boles, bossed on the stumps, draped from the 
interwoven branches, plumed on the spruce 
tops overhead. 

From the roofed aisles they stepped out into 
the slashed clearing where the Free-Trading 


144 


AMBUSH 


men had been at work. There lay the trampled, 
chip-littered crust, the felled trees, the sawn log 
lengths, the chopped stove wood, all just as it 
had been left. The very axes were still sunk 
in the scored blocks. A few ghostly hares at 
play about the piles vanished as the snowshoes 
began to clatter on the chips. Wayne stooped 
abruptly to examine something on the surface 
of the padded area. 

“By the Doom — look!” he commanded, 
harshly. 

Joan and Mason stared, speechless. Even in 
the poor light they recognized the litter Wayne 
pointed out, frozen bread crusts, rinds of bacon, 
the chocolate blotch of tea-leaves, a forgotten 
rum jug lying empty on the snow. 

“Condemnation!” Wayne blazed in terrific 
wrath. “You’re sure it’s our chopping ground. 
Mason?” 

“Tarnation sure!” avowed Mason. “Didn’t 
I set them to work here and leave them workin’? 
And they ain’t shifted sence, fer them’s our 
axes.” 

“The cursed curs! There’s only one place 
they could get that stuff to eat!” 

Wayne was off as he spoke, running round 
the edge of the clearing, searching for the trail 
of the intruders. 

“ Here are their tracks ! ” he shouted. “ Dozens 
of them, coming from the direction of Richelieu’s 
post. The Northwesters wear longer-tailed snow- 
shoes than ours, and there are the marks of both 
kinds going back. By Heaven, Richelieu has 


MUTINY 14 5 

drawn them off! Come on. Mason. Come on, 
Joan.” 

At a great speed he lurched out of the woods 
again over the snows toward Fort Wayne, Joan 
and Mason running in the path he broke. 

“Murdock, Murdock!” he yelled to the gate- 
keeper. “Send out your three. You yourself 
stand in the entrance with rifle ready. My men 
have been eating and drinking with the North- 
westers.” 

Dropping one armed man every hundred yards 
or so to form a line of communication with Mur- 
dock in the open gateway of his own fort, Wayne 
led on to Richelieu’s post. Mason he kept by 
him, and Joan, in spite of his entreaties to stay 
back on this line of communication, followed 
persistently upon their heels. 

The gateway of the Northwest post stood 
open as they ran up, and in the yellow glow that 
flooded from the lighted windows out across the 
trampled yard they could see Richelieu himself, 
a heavy military coat partially covering his re- 
splendent uniform, standing in the entrance* 
waiting as if he had expected such a visit. 

“Comment?” he chuckled when he saw their 
faces. “What do you want now?” 

“My men — curse you!” exploded Wayne, his 
rifle threatening from the hip. “They’re here. 
I want them quick!” 

Richelieu was unarmed, but he showed not 
the slightest fear of Wayne’s nor Mason’s wea- 
pon. He reached out and plucked Wayne by 
the arm, drawing him midway into the entrance 


146 


AMBUSH 


and pointing to a big door in the mess building 
that faced the gate. The door had just opened 
wide to admit two Northwesters rolling in a keg 
of liquor, and it revealed a long, candlelighted 
table inside, loaded with food and lined with 
feasting men. 

“Ciell see them!” Richelieu urged, mali- 
ciously. ‘‘Hunger is a great chastener, Ralph 
Wayne. They were tempted, and they fell. 
There they are, yours and mine together. I am 
not holding yours. Go and take them.” 

With a growl Wayne shook off the hand on his 
arm and darted for the door. 

“Mason, stay at the gate with Joan,” he flung 
over his shoulder, “and put a bullet through 
that laughing devil if he so much as moves!” 

Joan did not obey as her father expected she 
would. Instead, she inserted her hand within 
her capote, felt in the pocket of her blanket coat 
to assure herself that her pistol was there, and 
followed her father up to the door of the mess 
building. 

Inside reigned bedlam, pandemonium, 
drunken Northwesters and Free-Traders all 
mingled together, gorging themselves at the 
table, laughing, singing, shouting, smiting each 
other’s backs at ribald stories, and hammering 
the board with their liquor mugs. As wild a 
revel as eve he glimpsed, Wayne saw under the 
candlelight, and the sight sent him up the steps 
in a single jump. 

In a whirl of passion he jammed between the 
two Northwesters who were rolling in the liquor 


MUTINY 


147 


keg, put sole upon the keg itself on the top step, 
and sprang into the mess room with his rifle 
clubbed. 

“You condemned traitors! You treacherous 
sneaks!” he denounced, furiously, his gloomy 
face ablaze, his moustache quivering, his rifle- 
butt swaying every second as if to crash down 
upon the nearest head. “You steal off into the 
woods and devour like dogs what these dirty 
Northwesters throw you, while my own daughter 
starves for a bit of good food. Get up! Get 
up on your drunken legs and out of this!” 

They were too far gone in liquor for shame. 
Just a moment of bewildered staring, and a wave 
of laughter and jeering drowned his rage. They 
guffawed in his face. Northwester and Free- 
Trader alike, pounding the table more violently 
and making the room shake with their incoher- 
ent cries. While from the head of the feast one 
Harris, a Mississippi river-man and wood boss 
of the men that day, rose up teetering on his toes. 

“Come’n’ have a drink, Wayne,” he invited, 
“’n I’ll sing ye a liT song. Lissenere ” # 

“By the Doom, you were responsible, Harris!” 
Wayne roared in interruption. “And you’re 
responsible still. Get the men out. Call them 
out, you, every staggering son of them, or as 
sure as you’re drunk yourself, you’ll never sing 
again!” 

Wayne’s rifle-butt poised over Harris’s head, 
but without warning the two shrewd North- 
westers in the doorway shot their rolling keg into 
Wayne’s legs from behind. Wayne went down 


148 


AMBUSH 


backward, flat on the floor, his rifle flying from 
his hands. The two Northwesters were upon 
him like cats, clutching and grappling, prevent- 
ing his hands from securing the weapon again. 

Joan gave a cry as she saw her father go down 
and groped in her coat for her pistol. Mason 
had also seen from the gate, and he sprang for- 
ward, his rifle outflung. With the lightning- 
like sighting of the woodsman he took a snap 
shot in the doorway, but he had bargained with- 
out Richelieu. The latter reached the step as 
quick as Mason, struck up the Missourian’s 
rifle-barrel, sending the shot wild, and wrestled 
for the possession of the weapon. 

Joan had her own weapon out, but both her 
father and Mason whirled in such a tangle of 
bodies that she dared not shoot for fear of in- 
juring them. She hovered on the step of the 
mess-room doorway, screaming for aid through 
the frosty night. 

“ Murdock, Murdock!” she entreated, fren- 
ziedly. “My father — here! Bring all the other 
men, quick!” 

Tearing forward abreast the four broke 
through the gateway, but Richelieu had not 
been there alone. Back in the shadows of the 
stockade he had others lurking silently, waiting 
for such a rush. As Murdock and his three 
companions surged through, a dozen North- 
westers leaped bodily upon them, bearing them 
down, smothering their spitting rifles in the snow. 

“ Tiens / Mademoiselle Joan,” gloated Riche- 
lieu, emerging from the fighting group that 


MUTINY 149 

overpowered Mason, “you are the only one left 
and you I will take myself!” 

With the throb of the trapped wild thing in 
her breast Joan sprang aside from his reach, 
doubled back upon him like an agile hare, and 
raced for the gateway. The Northwesters still 
struggling to pinion Murdock and the other three 
Free-Traders, there was no one in the entrance 
to stop her, but Richelieu was gaining on her 
at every stride. 

She had on her snowshoes, and he, in mocca- 
sions only, outran her on the packed snow of 
the yard. The lurch of her running caused her 
to hold her fire while Richelieu dodged and 
laughed jeeringly, straining every moment to 
catch her before she left the palisades. 

Once, twice, three, four — five times she pre- 
tended to fire. Then in the gateway she whirled, 
snapping the shot in Richelieu’s face only arm’s 
length away. She saw his head flip back as if 
jolted with a fist. His body slumped, feet for- 
ward, on the snow and slid in against the open 
gate. Joan turned and ran with palpitating 
heart across the deep snows outside. 

She knew there was not a Free-Trader left in 
Fort Wayne, no safety for her in her own post. 
There was only one destination in her mind — 
Cumberland House. There was only one object 
of appeal — Carlisle. With him there was at 
least sanctuary from Richelieu and his wild crew, 
and, magnanimous enemy as he was, he would 
surely come to the aid of her father as he had 
done once before ! 


150 


AMBUSH 


Like the wind she ran, springing from the heel 
on the resilient webbing of her shoes, twisting 
her feet in the swing of the stride to clear her 
ankles of the fast-shifting frames, spurning the 
snow in white jets behind her. 

She looked back fearfully over her shoulder 
to see if Richelieu had arisen or if any of his 
men were following, but she saw nothing, heard 
nothing but the shouting and laughter in the 
Northwest post. The noise faded with the 
distance. She was alone on the cameo snow 
lighted faintly by the stars and a wan aurora 
that brightened the horizon to the northward. 

Cumberland House loomed ahead, the snow- 
roofed buildings crouching within the drifted 
stockade, rimmed by the black wall of the forest, 
and she pressed to the limit of her speed. As 
she swerved into the trampled path before the 
gate, another sound besides the shuffling of her 
snowshoes drifted to her ears. 

She paused, listening in the void of the frost, 
and immediately her wilderness-trained ears 
interpreted the other sound, a blending of to- 
boggan creak, husky pant, snowshoe crunch, 
whip-crack — the weird harmony of a coming 
dog train on the trail. 

Wondering, Joan wheeled, staring out over the 
snow-blanketed ice, and under the play of the 
aurora she glimpsed it, revealed, concealed, and 
revealed again by the flashlight flares, the whole 
train imaged against the pallid background like 
a painting of the Northland wastes. 

She caught the impression in its entirety. 


MUTINY 


151 


the long, winding furrow dotted with the 
loaded toboggans all exactly alike except 
that the more distant diminished in size; 
the track beaters ahead of the dogs leaning 
forward on their smoking shoes; the strain- 
ing, steaming, six-dog teams; the drivers on 
the run, their whips writhing through the 
air; the armed guards with rifles slung upon 
their hunched shoulders. 

And the figure in front of all, tall, big of 
frame, flattening the drifts with great seven-foot 
snowshoes cut long and swift in their lines for 
open-river work, seemed to her vaguely familiar. 

There was something in his poise of body, 
in his stride, in the way he held his head, looking 
straight forward under the hood of his capote, 
that insinuated itself into her consciousness. 
With a flash of enlightenment, illumination of 
brain or heart she could not tell which, she 
suddenly knew him. Even under the furred 
capote she knew him. 

“Paul, Paul!” she cried, and dashed down the 
snowy bank toward him. 


CHAPTER TEN 


THE RED DEATH 

“You, Joan! — now the God of Northmen is 
good!” exulted Carlisle, catching her hands and 
bringing her to a stop upon her coasting snow- 
shoes. “I was never dreaming ” 

But his gauntleted palm had closed upon 
the hard steel weapon in her grip, and his 
tone changed. 

“Good heavens, girl, what’s this? What’s 
wrong?” 

“Oh, come quickly, Paul, you and your 
force!” she implored. “My father’s a pris- 
oner in Richelieu’s post with all his men.” 

Involuntarily his mind flew back to the 
night when with this very weapon, and with 
other weapons more mighty, she had delayed him 
from reaching his York boats in time to prevent 
them being captured. 

Yet he knew this was no ruse of hers. There 
was no doubting the sincerity of her words 
as she poured out the story of Richelieu’s 
cunning and how with his hands almost upon her 
he had fallen to her shot in the gateway of his 
stockade. 

“Curse him!” Carlisle anathematized. “I 
hope it’s through his dirty heart. Let me 

152 


THE RED DEATH 


153 


help you up the bank, Joan. There! My 
men will be up in a minute.” 

From the top of the bank he began to call 
out the news to them, to Eugene Drummond, 
Missowa, Waseyawin, and their four middlemen 
who with the coming of winter at Grand Rapids 
had put aside canoe and paddle for toboggan 
and racket. They together with the drivers 
from the lower river posts cracked their whips 
more lustily, urging on the dogs. 

“Marche! Marche /” they called. “Hu! 
Hu r 

With the spume flying from the toboggan 
hoods they made a rush at the incline, teams 
clawing tenaciously, track-beaters hauling from 
the front with tow ropes, drivers shoving from 
behind. Toboggan after loaded toboggan un- 
dulated over the crest amid a mist-like shower of 
snow. 

“Chaw! Chaw /” yelled the drivers, and 
the giddes swerved to the right into the beaten 
track that wound up to the gates of Cumber- 
land House. 

“Who comes there?” demanded the loud 
voice of Galt. 

“Carlisle,” was the answer. “Hurry up, 
Galt. There’s trouble over at Richelieu’s post, 
and we’re needed there.” 

Immediately the gate swung open, and the 
dog-drivers cracked their whips anew. 

“ Yee ! Yee /” they commanded. 

The teams hauled round to the left with 
the sweep of the trail and galloped triumphantly 


154 


AMBUSH 


into the yard where they were swallowed up by 
a rush of shouting men. 

“Where’s Andrews, Galt?” asked Carlisle, 
bellowing to make himself heard in the clamour. 

“Here, Paul,” answered Andrews himself, 
pushing through the crowd, garbed in his 
winter gear, the heavy capote with the fur- 
fringed, helmet-like hood drawn as close about 
his face as he was wont to draw the dun cowl and 
mosquito veil in summer. “I’m glad you’re 
safely back, also glad to see you’ve got supplies.” 

“Forest fires delayed the York boats. Father, 
so that the frost caught us.” 

“Who’s that with you? Ah — you, Miss 

Wayne.” 

“Yes, and it’s only by grace of a lucky bullet 
that she is here,” Carlisle told him. “Richelieu, 
you understand! Her father and his men are 
prisoners, she says, and she did well to escape.” 

“You brave girl!” eulogized Andrews, taking 
her hands. “But you didn’t — kill him?” he 
added, anxiously. 

“I — I don’t know,” confessed Joan. “I fired in 
his face, and he went down. That’s all I know.” 

“A job for you in any case, Father,” intimated 
the Factor, “and who knows but you may have 
many more! Galt,” giving orders to the chief 
trader, “have the drivers of the lower river posts 
keep guard here. Arm all our Cumberland 
House force and bring them on our heels.” 

He turned through the entrance again with 
Joan and Andrews, and Eugene Drummond, 
Waseyawin, Missowa, and their middlemen sped 


THE RED DEATH 


1 55 


after, trailed by the rest of the Hudson’s Bay 
men as fast as Galt could hand out the weapons. 

As they skimmed back on Joan’s tracks 
toward the Northwest post, they saw that the 
gate was still open, and at the entrance the girl 
hesitated with repugnance till Carlisle took her 
hand with a reassuring gesture. 

There was blood upon the snow but no sign of 
Richelieu himself. Ahead of them, across the 
space of the yard, bulked the log mess building. 
The door was closed, but a yellow glow sprayed 
from the lighted square of the windows on either 
side of the door-jambs. 

Listening, they could hear no singing or 
shouting, but the angry hum of voices buzzed 
from within as from a colossal hive of bees. 

“We’d better leave our snowshoes here,” 
suggested Carlisle. “And don’t make a sound 
in the yard.” 

He set the example by twisting his toes from 
their loops and sticking the tails of his shoes 
into the snow. The others did the same, creep- 
ing after him, panther-footed in their moccasins, 
through the hard-packed yard. They reached 
the level of the steps without noise and, craning 
their necks, peered through the lighted window 
on the nearer side of the door. 

Inside the rough-walled mess-room the feast 
was all disordered, the feasters all disarranged, 
although it was at once apparent that no hand 
had been laid upon the main body of the Free- 
Traders who had partly composed the feast. 

Too drunk to care what company ruled the 


156 


AMBUSH 


Northland, they slouched in their chairs or 
lolled forward across the table, grinning maud- 
linly at the plight of Wayne who had sought to 
chastise them. Upon half-a-dozen chairs Wayne, 
Mason, Murdock, and the other three sober men 
sat in a row against the wall, their limbs bound 
tightly to the chair backs and the chair legs. 

Across one cleared end of the table lay Riche- 
lieu, his uniform flashing bright under the 
candlelight as three or four Northwesters worked 
over him, and in the ministering hands those 
outside could see his muscles stir slightly. 

“He’s not dead, anyway, thank Heaven!” 
whispered Andrews. 

“Then the devil must have him in special 
keeping!” growled Carlisle under his breath 
as he laid his hand quietly on the latch. “Stand 
well to one side of the door- jamb, Joan, and you, 
Andrews, in case of shooting.” 

He swung the door wide and stepped swiftly 
upon the doorsill, two long pistols in his hands 
covering the packed room. 

“ Bon soir , messieurs /” he greeted them, 
mockingly. 

He gave neither order nor threat, yet in- 
stinctively they knew his intent and froze into 
immobility, staring at his huge figure in the 
frost-rimed, furred capote and at the other 
figures, likewise frost-rimed, who crowded be- 
hind him on the steps, their long-barrelled rifles 
looking down the table. 

“So Richelieu met with a little accident in his 
game,” Carlisle laughed. “Is he badly hurt?” 


THE RED DEATH 


157 


“Not badly we think, m’sieu ’,” returned 
one of the Northwesters somewhat sullenly, 
“but you have a doctoring priest there. He 
could tell.” 

“Surely,” acquiesced Carlisle. “Will you 
take a look at him, Father?” 

He made room for Andrews to push in, and the 
priest walked up to the table where Richelieu 
lay. 

“Through the muscles of his neck, Pere ,” 
the Frenchman pointed out the course of the 
ball. “He is just on the edge of — how do you 
say it? — coming to!” 

“Yes,” nodded Andrews, passing a lighted 
candle over Richelieu as he lay, “and no great 
danger in that ball through his neck muscles! 
But do you see what is all through his face?” 

“Frost scars?” hazarded the Northwester, 
staring. 

“Frost scars? No, you never saw frost 
scars like those. The man has smallpox!” 

Swifter and harder than lead the diagnosis 
hit them. Every one in the room seemed to 
start as if from a violent shock. The North- 
westers around Richelieu threw up their arms 
before their faces in tangible defence against the 
plague, while all the rest crossed themselves in 
palpable terror. 

Even the slouching Free-Traders were stirred. 
The horrible significance of the word penetrated 
their drunken consciousnesses. They stood up 
unsteadily, their faces whitening, sucking in 
their breaths in nervous clicks. 


158 


AMBUSH 


Yet only for an instant did the great crowd 
cower. Abruptly, in a frantic rush, in an insane 
stampede they dashed for the doorway. 

Carlisle’s big frame blocked the exit, and 
he met the rush with clubbed pistols. Like 
cattle they came, shoving, trampling, frenzied 
with fear. Three of them went down from his 
clubbed weapons. A dozen more were hurled 
back from the stiff rifle-barrels around him, as 
from the ends of lances. 

The rout fell aside, temporarily checked, 
swerved and made for the windows. Swing- 
ing chairs, they smashed away the glass and 
frames, but at Carlisle’s command several 
of his men had sprung to the outside of the 
windows, and an array of rifle-barrels speared 
the Northwesters back into the room. 

‘‘Stop!” roared Carlisle through the crashing 
babel. “Stop your panic or I’ll order my men 
to shoot. They can rake the whole place from 
the door and windows. Which will you face: 
smallpox or bullets?” 

The threat stayed for a little their wild frenzy, 
and Carlisle seized upon the moment of their 
uncertainty to try to prevent another stampede. 

“There’s no use in making confounded fools 
of yourselves,” he told them. “You have to 
face the situation anyway, so why not face it 
like men? I’m not going to let you get away to 
any other post or Indian camp to spread the in- 
fection there. Just make up your minds to 
fight a sane fight here. First, some Free-Trader 
cut loose Wayne and the rest!” 


THE RED DEATH 


159 


Harris, the Mississippi River man who had 
wanted to sing Wayne a song, stepped forth. 
The crisis had sobered him like a dash of cold 
water, and he quickly slit the chair lashings with 
his sheath knife, freeing the six men. 

“Now, Wayne, you and your Free-Traders 
are under confinement with the Northwesters,” 
Carlisle informed him. “I hope you’re not 
thinking of making any trouble about it. If 
you are, make it right now and we’ll have it over 
with.” 

“Do you take me for a cursed fool?” blazed 
Wayne. “I know smallpox. I had it myself 
once on the Red River. My men have been 
hobnobbing with these Northwesters and two 
of the dirty dogs mauled me all over. Why, I 
wouldn’t dream of going back to my post. I 
wouldn’t go near my worst enemy. I wouldn’t 
rub up against you, Carlisle, and I hate you 
worse than a hundred hells.” 

“Thanks,” Carlisle sent back, sarcastically. 
“Wayne, you’re no hypocrite, anyway!” 

“But for heaven’s sake, watch my girl,” 
Wayne implored in his next breath. “Keep 
her away from this place. Joan, stand back 
from the doorway, there.” 

“I’m all right, father,” Joan assured him. 
“I’ve never been in the room.” 

“Did Richelieu touch you, girl?” 

“No, father, no, he didn’t. And how I 
wish you’d never gone in after your men!” 

“So do I, though I’m not afraid for myself,” 
growled her father. “But it can’t be helped 


160 


AMBUSH 


now. Anyhow, not likely anything will come of 
it. What’s the programme, Carlisle?” 

“ Everybody parade for inspection,” Carlisle 
answered. “You’ll all pass before Andrews. 
Any further cases remain here in the mess-room 
with Richelieu. The rest go over to the trading- 
room till we see what develops. Richelieu’s 
house we’ll save for the recoveries. File up, 
everyone!” 

Some bold, some fearful, nearly all nervous, 
they passed in review before the priest, who ex- 
amined each one closely for symptoms with his 
lighted candle. Now and then he put a question 
bearing on their general health or diet. 

Twice he motioned a Northwester out of the 
line to sit down in a chair by the table. There 
was scarcely need to examine the Free-Traders, 
since they had been exposed to infection only 
that day, but for the impression of equality in 
the unfortunate circumstance Andrews scanned 
them over with the rest. 

“Only the two cases besides Richelieu,” 
he announced when he had finished his in- 
spection. 

“All right, the two cases can clear this room 
and knock together three bunks while the rest 
go to the trading-room as I said,” directed 
Carlisle. 

“But bon Dieu /” burst out the Northwester 
Dentaire, he of the pointed moustache and the 
large hawked nose, “do you mean to pack us 
there like curs waiting for the Red Death to 
come and choose which one?” 


THE RED DEATH 161 

“Where else can I put you?” countered 
Carlisle. “Out in the freezing woods?” 

“I — I will not go,” Dentaire shrieked, his 
pale face contracting in convulsive muscular 
twitchings, his eyes staring wide, horrific, his 
trembling fingers never ceasing their continual 
crossing. “ Non ! Non ! Nor mes camarades 
either!” 

“Come out first, you!” ordered Carlisle, 
sensing a new outbreak and levelling his weapons 
at Dentaire. 

Dentaire dived suddenly behind the crowd 
and with a sweep of his feet kicked out the legs 
of the big sheet-iron stove in the middle of the 
room. With a crash the mass of red-hot metal 
fell upon the floor, and its bushels of glowing 
coals poured out across the planks. Dry as 
dead moss, the slivery planks blazed up in- 
stantaneously, and not content with fire in one 
place Dentaire scattered the coal to all corners 
of the room. 

“You hold us here to do your will?” he 
gibbered behind the screen of his fellows, “You 
will not let us out of the room? Voila , then, 
there will be no room. The candles, mes 
camarades — the candles aussi l ” 

They seized them from the table and flung 
them lighted into anything inflammable, into 
the woodbox, into the cupboard, into piles of old 
papers on the shelves about the walls. The 
place was aflame in all quarters at once, choked 
with smoke and shaken to its foundations by 
the concerted rush to escape. 


162 


AMBUSH 


Dentaire, slim, swift as a dancing-master, 
was in the van of those who surged to the door- 
way. Half-minded at first to put a ball through 
him, Carlisle lowered his weapons and made way. 
The room was now a roaring furnace, and there 
was no holding men in it to be burned to death. 

“Back from the door and windows,” he 
ordered. “Galt, shut the gate and you, Joan, 
keep close to me. Back, men, I say, and for the 
lives of you don’t touch any of them!” 

“ Oui , touch us at your peril,” warned Den- 
taire. “Stop us at your doom. But put the 
hand on us and receive the Red Death!” 

In a stream they gushed forth, leaping down 
the steps, vaulting over the window-sills. North- 
westers and Free-Traders together in wild flight. 
In strange anomaly, armed men backing away 
from men only partly armed, the Hudson’s Bay 
force gave them the right of way. Weapons 
could hold domination over them penned within 
walls but not as a mad horde here in the open 
where a hand grip might prove more deadly 
than a bullet. 

“Shoot!” Dentaire shrieked, crazily. “Shoot 
if you have the thought to keep us. You may 
kill one, two, six, a dozen, but I swear by the 
Virgin that the rest will lay the plague on you 
with their fingers! Come on, mes camarades , 
come on!” 

“The demented fool!” denounced Carlisle, 
helplessly. “ The whole mob of demented fools ! 
Hold your fire, men. The idiot means what he 
says.” 


THE RED DEATH 


163 


The rush passed them, some making for the 
gate, some for the shed next the store where the 
snowshoes and toboggans were kept. Galt had 
managed to wedge the gate bar so that it could 
not be withdrawn, but the crazed mob was not 
to be denied. Many climbed up on the palisades 
to the top of the gate. Many more grovelled in 
the snow at the bottom, worming their shoulders 
under the heavy barrier. With a united heave 
they tore the gate bodily from its hinges and 
hurled it aside. 

Meanwhile their comrades had cast down the 
toboggans, thrown on the grub-bags from the 
store, seized their snowshoes, and rushed to join 
them. Together the two sections surged through 
the gateway, Northwesters and Free-Traders still 
mingled, all Richelieu’s Frenchmen and post 
Indians, all Wayne’s men of the Missouri, men 
of the Mississippi, men of the Red, his Crees and 
Chippewayans — the whole crowd that had been 
drinking with the Northwesters that day. 

Their panic seemed to increase as they ran. 
They strained forward, bound for immunity 
wherever they might find it, falling over each 
other upon the aurora-lighted snows till they dis- 
appeared into the black mystery of the sur- 
rounding forest. 

Except the Hudson’s Bay forces, none re- 
mained in the yard but Richelieu whom An- 
drews and Wayne had carried out and laid down 
within the light and heat of the fire, Wayne him- 
self, Mason, Murdock, and the three sober Free- 
Traders. Having contracted the disease one 


164 


AMBUSH 


summer while doctoring Indian camps on Eaba- 
met Lake, Andrews, like Wayne, had no fear of 
contamination himself, yet he was careful to 
keep his patient apart from the others. 

Although Richelieu stirred from time to time, 
he had never opened his lips or his eyes. Upon 
his forehead, close up to the hair, the priest could 
discern a large bruise where he had evidently 
struck his head against the gate in falling. 

“The head blow is the cause of his uncon- 
sciousness rather than the neck wound,” An- 
drews pointed out to Carlisle and the others who 
came peering from a respectful distance. 
“Where shall we take him, Paul? Is there any 
chance of saving the other buildings?” 

“Not the slightest chance,” Carlisle decided. 
“We’ll do well if we keep the fire inside the 
palisades. We don’t want it to get into that 
fringe of trees and round through the forest to 
the other posts. Richelieu must stay where he 
is for a little. He’ll not be cold in this heat.” 

“You won’t risk trying to get anything out, 
Paul — the supplies or the furs?” asked Joan, 
anxiously. 

Carlisle shook his head grimly. 

“No, the risk’s too great! They’ve been 
handling the food and pelts, you see. We 
daren’t touch anything, but I think we’ll level 
the store and fur house to hold the flames as low 
as possible.” 

He ran outside the palisades with Galt, Drum- 
mond, and others and came back bearing long 
trunks of young spruce that had been drawn up 


THE RED DEATH 


165 


from the woods for fuel. These were five or six 
inches through and stripped of their branches, of 
a fit size to be handled as battering rams. 

The mess building was all a-roar, throbbing 
on the night like the fire-pit of some gigantic 
engine, belching flame through windows and door 
and the roof that was commencing to sag. 

The heat was terrific, lance-like, unbearable 
upon the uncovered flesh, but with the hoods of 
their capotes puckered tight to shield their faces 
from the flames, Carlisle and his men crept up to 
the buildings with the long spruce trunks in their 
gauntleted hands. 

With swing and prod, swing and prod, they 
battered off the already burning roof troughs of 
the fur room, exposing the top logs which they 
began to rattle down tier by tier, but the fire 
was quicker than they. 

It caught on the walls and beams and the 
pelts that hung thereon, and the flare of the 
greasy fats shot fifty feet into the air. 

“What a waste !” deplored Joan, as Carlisle 
and the men were forced to fall back from the 
geyser of flame. “What a waste of splendid 
fur!” 

“Yes, but it couldn’t be otherwise,” observed 
Carlisle. “We couldn’t have saved it even if 
we had wanted to. The heat’s enough to shrivel 
one!” 

Still it was with a qualm of regret that he 
gazed over his shoulder as he rushed in again 
toward the store. Mink, marten, otter, ermine — 
costly, beautiful — blazed and wrinkled before his 


166 


AMBUSH 


eyes; rare silver and black fox skins singed and 
smouldered, the silky fur curling up like downy 
feathers to the licking flame. He saw it as 
desecration, as profanation, as a crime against 
the enduring wild — and all the handiwork of the 
panic-stricken Dentaire ! 

The roof of the store he got off before the fire 
reached it. The wall logs thundered down amid 
clanking showers of cooking utensils, knives, 
axes, and other trade-stuff from, the shelves, 
his own trade-stuff that Richelieu had captured 
in his York boats. Piled upon the floor, stand- 
ing revealed under the fire’s glare, showed his 
own food supplies captured at the same time 
along with the trade-stuff. 

“There were greases in the supplies, Galt,” he 
told his chief trader, “pork and such, and some 
kegs of powder that might be dangerous. Pass 
the kegs along as I shove them out.” 

One by one with his pole butt he rolled the 
barrels and kegs off the floor, and they were 
prodded far back into the snow beyond the fire 
zone. Then he pushed down the top tier of the 
flour bags, stacked in layers of four. Three of 
the sacks fell with solid, dusty thuds. The 
fourth struck lightly and bounced to the feet 
of Galt. 

“What’s that, Henry?” asked Carlisle. “Not 
heavy enough for flour, is it?” 

The chief trader stooped and scrutinized it 
by the brilliant light, discerning a canvas dun- 
nage bag with drawstrings in its mouth. It bore 
the customary marking H. B. C., and as Galt 


THE RED DEATH 167 

turned it over with his pole the name “ Cotameg” 
stared him in the face. 

“By Nenaubosho! (the Cree Evil Spirit)!” 
he exclaimed. “It’s the Chippewa’s gear-bag, 
Factor. Piled in by mistake among the flour 
sacks when they captured your boats!” 

“By Jove, Galt, is that so?” cried Carlisle, 
coming over to look. “Unlucky Cotameg! 
You buried him without his gear, eh?” 

“We had to,” declared Galt. “We couldn’t 
find his gear, and I guess it was here all the 
time.” 

With a thud of his pole he broke the draw- 
strings in the mouth of the bag, thrust the end 
of the pole into the open mouth and shook it. 
Out rolled worn moccasins, soiled trousers of 
buckskin, frowsy parfleches of a filthiness un- 
imaginable. 

“Shades of bold Rupert!” blurted Carlisle. 
“I didn’t know he was as dirty as all that. Is 
that the only gear he owned?” 

But Galt’s eyes were brighter than Carlisle 
had ever seen eyes of Cree shading. His face 
was more violently astounded than Carlisle had 
ever beheld a face of Cree casting. 

“It’s — it’s not Cotameg’s,” he stammered, 
even his voice losing the unemotional timbre 
of his mother tongue. “It’s old White Loon’s 
and his family’s — the smallpox Indians I stopped 
from coming in to Cumberland House!” 

“By heavens! Galt, are you sure?” bellowed 
Carlisle. 

“Sure? Didn’t I stand and see them strip 


168 


AMBUSH 


it off at my orders? There are five moccasins, 
all of different sizes. White Loon had two sons, 
a nephew, and a cousin with him, you remember ! 

“Besides, I went out to drop a few trees on 
their camp and burn it at the first snow when 
there was no danger of firing the forest, but the 
clothes were gone. I put the theft down to the 
sneaky wolverines, set fire to the teepee, and 
thought no more about it.” 

“But, Galt, Cotameg didn’t take and put 
them in his gear-bag. You understand Indians, 
and you know no Indian born would go near the 
smallpox camp at Carcajou Cove, much less lay 
a hand on anything there.” 

“I know,” nodded Galt, pushing bag and all 
back into the fire. “It was no Indian who put 
them in Cotameg’s bag. It was a white man, a 
white man with the iron nerve of the devil.” 

“Then who was that white man?” propounded 
Carlisle. 

To the chief trader he put the question; to 
Eugene Drummond and all the Hudson’s Bay 
forces behind; to Joan, hovering as near as the 
flames would let her; to Wayne and his five 
faithfuls grouped by themselves off to one side. 

They stared at him unanswering, stricken 
dumb by the horrible enormity of the thing, 
and as he looked into their eyes, recollections of 
many past incidents flashed unbidden through 
Carlisle’s mind. 

He remembered that it was Cotameg who had 
let the Northwest mail-courier Bertand escape 
into Grande Portage, remembered Cotameg’s 


THE RED DEATH 


169 


frequent absences from Cumberland House, his 
delay in coming in to the post from his fishing 
upon the morning he wanted to send him to the 
Pas, and the fact that Richelieu knew he had 
sent for his York boats and was on the watch 
for their coming. 

“ I see it now ! ” he burst out, suddenly. “ Cota- 
meg was in Richelieu’s pay from the first. The 
Chippewa must have been at the Northwest post 
that Sunday morning I sent him and Smoking 
Pine down river, and that’s when his gear-bag 
was filled unknown to him. It was a plan to 
turn the plague loose in Cumberland House, but 
in the ways of the North the bag came back un- 
touched to the one who filled it.” 

“My God! Paul,” cried Joan, shuddering, 
“how could any man do that?” 

“He ain’t wan man,” put in Drummond, 
promptly. “He be wan flamin’ diable , an’ if I 
be had ma way, I’m would t’row heem back into 
de fire w’ere he be come from.” 

“That’s the way to talk, Drummond,” sup- 
ported Wayne. “It’s only what he deserves.” 

“Maybe there’s worse than fire in store for 
him,” reminded Andrews, prophetically. “He’s 
fully conscious now, Paul. His eyes are open.” 

Richelieu awoke in a daze, raising himself up 
on his elbow and staring at the blazing walls 
which had burned low enough to allow the Hud- 
son’s Bay men to dart in and scoop snow upon 
the flames with their long snowshoes used as 
shovels. 

“Name of a name!” he blurted, unable to 


170 


AMBUSH 


comprehend the crimson glare, the shovelling 
figures of the men, and the hiss of the snow masses 
smothering the fire. “I dreamed I was on the 
brink of hell. Comment? Has my dream come 
true?” 

“Partly,” explained Carlisle, grimly striding 
over to him. “Your men set fire to your post 
and scattered to the thirty-two points of the 
north when they heard you had smallpox!” 

“Smallpox!” echoed Richelieu, unbelievingly. 

“Yes, the Red Death! Cotameg’s dunnage- 
bag came back to you among the food-sacks.” 

Richelieu’s lips parted stiffly, but Carlisle 
poised his moccasined foot as if to spurn him into 
the dying conflagration. 

“Don’t say a word, Richelieu!” he warned, 
passionately. “ Not a cursed word, or in you go ! ” 

Richelieu closed his lips again, and Carlisle 
dropped his foot. 

“I guess we’ll get a toboggan and run him 
across to Cumberland House,” he told Andrews. 
“Eugene, run and fetch it. I’ll set aside one of 
my buildings for him alone.” 

“Condemnation, no, you won’t, Carlisle!” 
expostulated Wayne. “I’ve no love for you as I 
said, but I’m a white man. None of your Hud- 
son’s Bay traders has been exposed to infection. 
We six Free-Traders have. Besides, I’ve had it. 
Andrews has had it. So we’ll take Andrews and 
Richelieu to Fort Wayne with us. Richelieu can 
be put in the fur house. We’ll use the trading- 
room, and Andrews may have my own quarters.” 

“By Jove, you are a white man, Wayne!” 


THE RED DEATH 


171 


accepted Carlisle, his face lighting up. “I 
wouldn’t have asked it of you, but I take your 
offer in the spirit in which it’s given.” 

“There’s a little selfishness in it,” Wayne 
confessed. “I would go crazy if Joan were near 
any infection, and you’ll have to give her quar- 
ters at Cumberland House. Send your men over 
now to my post for her stuff and the furs and 
everything but the bare necessities we’ll use. 
They can gut the buildings before we go into 
them. And about the furs, you’ll keep them in 
trust only, so that there will be no trouble over 
them!” 

“All right,” agreed Carlisle, heartily, hasten- 
ing to issue his orders and to direct Drummond 
to place the toboggan he had brought so that 
Richelieu might roll onto it. “And, Wayne, 
I’ll leave you a load of provisions at your palisade 
gate.” 

“Thanks,” nodded Wayne. “I’ll take them 
in the spirit they’re given.” 

He passed with his five Free-Traders through 
the gateway. Andrews, Drummond, Galt, and 
the other Hudson’s Bay men followed after, 
drawing Richelieu upon the toboggan. Carlisle 
turned from a last inspection of the smoking 
post ruins and gave Joan his hand for the run 
across the snows to Cumberland House. 

“We, too, are in isolation,” he observed with 
a whimsical laugh. “Do you happen to care, 
Joan?” 

She gave him a tantalizing smile as they raced 
side by side. 


172 


AMBUSH 


“As long as I can go to my father’s stockade 
every day, talk to him, and know that he is all 
right, I — why, I expect to be very comfortable 
in Cumberland House,” she evaded, naively. 
“And do you know what I’m going to make you 
do the very minute we get there, Paul?” 

“What?” he challenged. 

“Cook me a full-course dinner!” Joan decreed. 


CHAPTER ELEVEN 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 

The full tale of the fight of the Sturgeon Lake 
Northwesters and Free-Traders did not come 
down the Saskatchewan to Carlisle for several 
weeks. Christmas Day passed without the ar- 
rival of any of his Indian trappers, but about 
three o’clock on New Year’s Day the jingle of 
bells brought him and Joan running to the door. 

A grand Cree cavalcade they beheld, tobog- 
gans and carioles drawn by gaily-caparisoned 
dogs with bead-worked blankets on their backs 
and bells upon their collars. Pottering in the 
rear, the squaws drove the teams with the duffle, 
children and furs packed into the carioles, but 
the hunters sped in front, gorgeous in their new 
capotes and leggings fringed with porcupine 
quills. 

At Carlisle’s beckoning they trooped up to 
the steps where he stood, led by old Soaring 
Eagle, a chief of the tribes and one of the best 
fur-takers on his books. 

“It is Oochemegou Kesigow — the New Year’s— 
the Kissing Day of the Crees, when every man is 
supposed to kiss every woman in sight — Factor,” 
Soaring Eagle greeted, “and we are here accord- 
ing to our custom.” 


173 


174 


AMBUSH 


“That is good, Soaring Eagle,” returned 
Carlisle, gravely, albeit there was a twinkle in 
his eye as his glance met Joan’s. “There is a 
gift for each one of you at the store when you 
trade your furs. How was the catch? ” 

“We took much fur, Factor,” reported Soar- 
ing Eagle, “but we will take no more in that 
upper country. After the trade and feast we 
will hunt toward the Wenipak. The Red Death 
is raging yonder, and we fear it stalking through 
our teepees.” 

“Where, Soaring Eagle?” demanded Joan, 
anxiously. “Where is it raging?” 

“Where roams the wind, Golden Daughter? 
Where fall the forest leaves? The Red Death is 
killing out the posts and tribes of the French 
Company and the Free-Trading men as red fire 
runs among the trees. So my far- journeying 
tribesmen bring the word.” 

“It hasn’t got among our own Indians, then, or 
into our own posts?” asked Carlisle with concern. 

“No,” declared Soaring Eagle, “for the 
struggle among the companies has been bitter 
and nothing but rifle balls has passed between. 
But the tribes of the Hudson’s Bay Company 
in the other districts are fearful even as we. They 
are fleeing from the Red Death, going east to- 
ward James Bay, south upon the prairie, or north 
to the Barren Lands.” 

“ Heavens ! ” ejaculated Carlisle. “ That means 
the closing of those posts. Are there no dis- 
tricts free from it at all? ” 

“The tales of the Indian runners say that it 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 


175 


has not spread as far as Fort des Prairies yet 
nor to the Athabasca, but that all posts are 
closed against newcomers.” 

Carlisle pointed toward Richelieu’s dismantled 
post. 

“There’s where the Red Death started, Soar- 
ing Eagle,” he informed. 

“So ran the story of those who fled among the 
Indians and posts of the other districts,” nodded 
the old chief. 

“And there,” went on Carlisle, pointing to 
Fort Wayne, “the Northwest leader is sick with 
it. There the Free-Trade leader watches by the 
bed of Mason, the only one left alive of five 
faithful men. There our praying man is with 
them, all under the plague.” 

“So,” nodded Soaring Eagle, unmoved. 

“You are not afraid?” 

“I am not afraid, Factor. If it was not good 
for us to come, you would have sent a runner to 
warn us. We are here, and after the feast we 
trail to the Wenipak.” 

“It is well,” concluded Carlisle. “Go to the 
store now and Galt will give you your gifts.” 

“It is Oochemegou Kesigow,” reminded Soar- 
ing Eagle, looking at Joan. 

Carlisle’s eyes twinkled again, but Joan was 
equal to the occasion. 

“I kiss you all,” she spoke in Cree, touch- 
ing her finger-tips to her lips and tossing them 
the caress. 

Soaring Eagle and the others gravely acknowl- 
edged the salute, catching the kiss in mid-air 


176 


AMBUSH 


on their own finger-tips and carrying it to their 
mouths; then they stalked off to the store. 

Carlisle backed hastily indoors under Joan’s 
indignant assault. 

‘‘You wanted him to say it,” she accused. 
“Just wait till you have to salute all the greasy 
squaws! But, seriously, Paul, isn’t it horrible 
news?” 

“It’s very bad,” admitted Carlisle, with a 
shake of his head. “Yet don’t let it spoil our 
New Year’s dinner, Joan. I wouldn’t care about 
myself, but I want Lewis and the men of the 
other posts to enjoy themselves. You see it’s 
the only break for them in the whole winter.” 

“I won’t let the news spoil it,” she promised. 
“Though there’s fear in my heart!” 

“Fear of what?” 

“Fear that it means the end of my father’s 
already shaken power!” 

“I don’t know,” Carlisle deftly hedged. “I 
can’t tell anything about it till I get word how 
things stand in the other districts from official 
quarters. The governor promised when I left 
James Bay to have a message routed through 
before spring to let me know the exact situation. 
But hurry, Joan. It will soon be dark, and the 
men will be over from the store.” 

Joan hastened about, directing the work of the 
two young Cree maids in the kitchen, putting the 
finishing touches upon her New Year’s dinner 
spread upon the long table in the Factor’s council- 
room, and while he watched her gliding about, 
Carlisle marvelled at the miracle of a woman’s 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 177 

touch in softening the bare austerity of his former 
quarters. 

He had given the house up to her entirely since 
the night Richelieu’s post was wrecked and the 
rest went to Fort Wayne, to do with it what she 
willed. 

He himself had taken business and sleeping 
quarters in Galt’s trading-room with Galt and 
Drummond, and it was ever a source of pleasure 
to them to pass from that rough environment 
into this newly consecrated feminine sphere for 
their meals or to spend the long, storm-bitten 
winter evenings before the roaring birch logs 
of the fireplace. 

The possessions transferred from Fort Wayne 
before it went under isolation she had used to 
garnish Cumberland House. Formerly Car- 
lisle’s council-room contained nothing but table 
and chairs, guiltless of any adornment. Now the 
bare planks of the floor were hidden under a 
plethora of fur rugs, skins of the wolf, lynx, black 
and grizzly bears; the bare walls were covered 
with curios, weapons of the savage tribes, ant- 
lers of the red deer, moose, and caribou, horns of 
mountain-sheep and musk-ox. 

Her cushions, filled with downy wild-goose 
feathers, covered with leather in coloured pat- 
terns and trimmed with Indian bead-work, 
padded the chairs. Her couch, luxuriously fur- 
robed, invited lounging by the fireplace; her 
pictures decorated the mantel above. 

In one comer stood her harpsichord, brought 
in by the Red River route from St. Paul, while 


178 


AMBUSH 


upon a shelved cabinet beside was piled her 
music and her library, a collection begun while 
schooling at St. Paul and added to at every op- 
portunity — history, travel, poetry, French and 
Spanish novels which she read in the original. 

Upon the table she hovered over in the deep- 
ening dusk of the room was arrayed her cherished 
linen, flat silverware, china, the magnificent 
silver tea-service and tall brass candelabra. 

The latter she filled with candles, and as she 
lighted them, the Hudson’s Bay officers came 
tramping over from the store, Drummond, Galt, 
Lewis in from the Pas, Lea from the Nepowin, 
Garry from Moose Lake, Hampton from Chima- 
wawin, Jarvis, from Grand Rapids, Wells from 
the Seepanock Channel. 

“ Bonsoir , Mademoiselle Wayne,” greeted 
Drummond, opening the door in the lead, his 
volatile face a-quiver with suppressed merri- 
ment. “Wan happy New Year to you, an’ I’m 
wondaire if you remembaire dis day be Ooche- 
megou Kesigow?” 

“Soaring Eagle told you, Eugene,” flashed 
Joan, intuitively, breaking into laughter with 
them all. “But it shall never be said that I did 
less for white men than for red. You may kiss 
my hand, sir.” 

With the air of an old-world courtier Drum- 
mond bent over it, then all his companions, and 
Joan, with a queenly gesture, waved them to the 
table. 

“The feast is ready; be seated, gentlemen,” 
she directed. 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 


179 


She took her stately place behind the silver 
tea-service. Carlisle took his opposite her, be- 
yond the branching candelabra, at the foot of the 
table, and the other officers ranged themselves 
on either side. Under the mellow candlelight 
they dined like true lords of the North in the pres- 
ence of a gracious lady. 

Course by course the quiet-footed Cree maids 
served the meal — soup of delicious moose meat, 
stewed ptarmigan breasts garnished with forest 
herbs, fish course of flaky lake trout, the savoury 
dressed goose, the Christmas pudding and cake, 
and the wines of Sicily and Madeira. 

Then while the men lighted the fragrant 
company tobacco in their pipes, Joan stole away 
to her instrument, playing soft, dreamy airs that 
wafted like summer winds through the hazy 
incense of the room. As they smoked and 
listened, the officers gave their brief verbal re- 
ports to Carlisle: so much fur taken in trade, 
this and that incident in the post routine, such 
and such friction with the adherents of the rival 
companies. 

Succinctly Garry told how a vagrant party of 
Free-Traders sacked two of his fur trains on 
Moose Lake. Lea described the looting of his 
Nepowin post by a tribe of the French Com- 
pany’s Indians and his struggle to save the 
greater part of the fur which he had managed to 
cache safely on the Saskatchewan by the mouth 
of Ptarmigan Creek. 

Wells related how he had captured a North- 
west guide forerouting the Seepanock Channel 


180 


AMBUSH 


for brigades in the spring and sent him south- 
ward on La Longue Traverse to the Assiniboine. 

“But never fear, zur,” Wells concluded in his 
broad wheeze, “they zhan’t get through there 
I will zee to’t.” 

Their tones were low so as not to raise discord 
in the music’s harmony. Joan’s playing was 
zephyr-like, unobtrusive as meditation, so as 
not to break the thread of their council. But 
as the talk lagged and lapsed, her music increased 
in volume, and the men heard the airs of their 
own lands swelling in their ears. 

With magic interpretation she played them 
back to those lands, to the rugged Highlands, the 
English downs, the vineyards of sunny France. 
Their battle chants, their hymns of unction, 
their folk legends, their hearth songs, the songs 
that never die she played them, and their hearts 
went out to their far-off homes. 

Galt drove an imaginary paddle down to the 
Sault, home of the white adventurer who had 
fathered him and his old mother of the Crees. 
Drummond lay sun-basking under the loom of 
the Pyrenees on the banks of the River Adour. 
Garry and Lea trod again their beloved Inver- 
ness and Cromarty. Hampton climbed his 
Devon hills. Jarvis saw and heard the colour 
and rattle of London. Wells stood under the 
waving trees upon the green lawns of the Squire’s 
house. Lewis watched with his aged eyes the 
gray seas breaking upon the foamy crags which 
whelped him, in his nostrils the salted fog, in his 
soul the void that runs: 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 


181 


From the dim shieling of the misty island 
Mountains divide us and a world of seas, 

But still our hearts are true, our hearts are Highland, 
And we in dreams behold the Hebrides. 

On and on she played while they drifted in 
their dreams and Carlisle lay back in his chair 
before the fireplace watching her through the 
blue wreaths of his pipe smoke. Ethereal, in- 
tangible, she seemed through the blur, the candle- 
light filtering softly on her spun-gold hair and 
golden satin dress and striking the facets of a 
few choice rings upon her nimble fingers. 

For him, too, her magic was potent. He was 
a little boy again in the post of Niagara; his was 
the boyish vision of its pageants and alarms; 
and his was the boyish memory of his father, tall, 
straight, handsome in the dashing uniform of a 
captain of the Rangers — all in that old day be- 
fore his mother died. 

When the music ceased they did not know it 
till they saw Joan slipping off the stool and com- 
ing toward them through the haze. 

“Isn’t it time to start their dance, Paul?” she 
smiled. “You know I want to take my father 
his own New Year’s dinner very soon.” 

“Yes, yes,” assented Carlisle, returning from 
his childhood’s vision and dropping his pipe 
ashes into the birch logs, “we’ll go right over and 
set things going and then see about the dinner.” 

He helped her on with the beautiful ermine 
capote, its hood fringed with tails of the silver 
fox, and they followed the men across to the 
store buildings and into the trading-room. 


182 


AMBUSH 


The trading-room was full of whites, breeds, 
and Indians of both sexes waiting expectantly. 
They, like Carlisle’s officers, had feasted to the 
full, and now they were ready for the merriment. 

The room was cleared for the occasion, benches 
ranged round the sides, and the walls and ceiling 
lined with bright red calico and hung with the 
New Year’s decorations of evergreens and scar- 
let swamp berries. Upon Galt’s counter were 
placed three chairs for the musicians, high up 
under the burning candles upon the shelves. 

One of these chairs Galt took himself with his 
violin. Drummond and Jarvis climbed up on 
either side of him with bass viol and piccolo. 
The crowd upon the floor at Carlisle’s direction 
resolved itself into couples, forming a Circassian 
circle round the room, and to the vamping of the 
violin strings the dance was on. 

Buoyantly, madly, they danced, all their 
spirits — congealed through long, lonely months — 
melting instantly in the warmth of human com- 
panionship and effervescing in flourish, laughter, 
and shout. Though Carlisle and Joan withdrew 
after the first dance, the gaiety did not pause. 
They had given it the necessary impetus. The 
feet of joyous abandon were loosed. 

While they watched a little, the square dances, 
string dances, and round dances shuttled in quick 
succession. The musicians changed, the instru- 
ments changed, violin, viol, and piccolo giving 
way to mandolin, tambourine, or bagpipes, but 
the tide of music and restless muscles flowed 
perpetually. 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 


183 


One moment it was Galt leading the Feather 
Dance of the tribes; the next, Drummond banging 
the tambourine he had learned from his Spanish 
neighbours and reeling a Spanish whirl; or, again, 
Lewis strutting the length of the room, his dron- 
ing bag under his arm, skirling away on the pipes 
to the Highland steps. 

From that carnival of colour and movement 
Carlisle and Joan were never missed when they 
stole unostentatiously back to the Factor’s 
house. The Cree maids had cleared the table, 
but according to Joan’s instructions they had 
reserved a choice portion of each course, enough 
for Wayne and Andrews and Mason if he should 
have the heart to taste the soup or nibble a 
ptarmigan breast. 

It was packed in a large-lidded basket woven 
of willow by the Cree weavers, all ready to be 
warmed up and eaten, and Carlisle, adding a 
bottle of wine and a canister of tobacco, hung 
the basket over his shoulder by its leather thong. 

The sound of the dance echoed forth from the 
trading-room as they passed by and on along 
the fringe of trees toward the camp-fires of the 
Crees. Here in the shelter of the forest all those 
in from the trap lines had made open bivouac, 
snow-walled quadrangles scraped to earth, 
floored with spruce boughs and warmed by 
abundant fires. 

A few old squaws, too old to care for the 
revelry in the post, were tending the fires, 
while around the blaze sprawled many groups of 
wolf-dogs, stick-tied to prevent them wandering 


184 


AMBUSH 


or fighting, lying with feet outstretched to the 
heat or worming forward luxuriously upon their 
bellies. 

Each team relaxed by themselves, snarling 
defiance at any inquisitive encroacher from a 
strange outfit and baring fangs in meteor-like 
leap and retreat at the end of their leashes. On 
one side of the fire in the end quadrangle which 
they skirted an especially large five-dog team 
lay by an up-ended cariole, and Carlisle pointed 
them out to Joan. 

“Those big Hudson’s Bays are Soaring Eagle’s 
dogs,” he informed her. “Aren’t they splendid 
brutes ? They weigh one hundred and fifty pounds 
apiece, and they’re the fastest dogs in my district.” 

The Cree camp-fires winked fainter behind 
them, and they neared the palisades of Fort 
Wayne. Upon the snows in front of the entrance 
they could see a black figure pacing up and down 
and dancing on his snowshoes to keep warm, 
the Indian guard posted there to prevent curious 
huskies from clawing a way under the gate or 
unwarned hunters from inadvertently stumbling 
into the plague. 

“Blow your whistle, Burning Cloud,” ordered 
Carlisle, when the guard challenged. 

Burning Cloud with a grunt of recognition 
complied, sending a shrill screeching note 
through the frosty air, the signal for Wayne to 
come to the entrance. The gate had been fitted 
with an outside bar for greater facility in han- 
dling, and this Burning Cloud withdrew, swing- 
ing the barrier wide. The yellow blotch of an 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 


185 


opened door showed in the post, with Wayne’s 
fur-capped head touching the top of the seven-foot 
doorway as he emerged. 

“ Paul, are you going to tell him about his posts 
and Indians?” Joan whispered while Wayne, 
wrapped in a big bearskin coat, crunched across 
the yard. 

“I don’t know,” Carlisle replied. I thought 
I might if he asked. Why?” 

“Don’t tell him,” she pleaded. “You know 
his nature, all gloom and bitterness, and through 
no moulding of his own ! He’s had too much to 
bear already with the cutting off of his trade, semi- 
starvation, the loss of his post men, and this 
hateful isolation here. Now a new calamity 
would lie like a mountain on his spirit to weight 
him down. Please don’t tell him, Paul — 
yet!” 

“I won’t, then, Joan,” he agreed. “You 
know I don’t want to heap trouble on him. Hello, 
Wayne,” calling cheerily to the Free-Trader, 
“a happy New Year to you! That sounds like 
mockery, but I mean as happy as the circum- 
stances allow. Thanks to Joan, we had a real 
New Year’s dinner at Cumberland House, and 
she’s brought you your share.” 

He stepped forward in the gateway and hung 
the basket on a wooden pin. 

“The same to you, Carlisle!” greeted Wayne, 
with simulated cheerfulness, taking the basket 
down by its thong. “And you, girl! I knew 
you wouldn’t forget me.” 

“No, no, father, I couldn’t forget you, and I 


186 


AMBUSH 


wish this imprisonment were all over. But if 
you’re going to talk a while, take the basket in- 
side first. The food was warm when we left but 
it will soon freeze.” 

“Yes, it’ll soon freeze,” nodded Wayne, some- 
what absently, “but I’ll take it inside in a 
moment. I wanted to ask about your hunters, 
Carlisle. We saw them making in to the post 
to-day, and I thought they might have heard 
some news of my own men from my Indians. 
Where they in touch with my tribes at all?” 

“No,” answered Carlisle, truthfully enough, 
“my hunters haven’t been in touch with your 
Indians. They didn’t pass any word with them 
or with the Northwesters’ tribes.” 

“Ah!” sighed Wayne, in disappointment. “I 
didn’t know. I thought perhaps they might 
have. But no matter, I’ll send them word that 
the plague will soon be over and they’ll be in 
shortly with their fur.” 

“Mason’s getting better, then, father?” cried 
Joan, eagerly. “I’m so glad!” 

“Better?” echoed Wayne, with gloomy shake 
of his head. “He died at dark!” 

“High Heaven!” breathed Carlisle, while Joan 
clutched his arm with a sob trembling in her 
throat. “ That’s hard, Wayne. That’s too abomi- 
nably hard — the last of your five!” 

“Condemnation, yes!” exclaimed Wayne, a 
wave of rebellious despair rising through his 
gloomy apathy. “Why couldn’t the plague 
have taken some of those treacherous curs who 
ran away, and left me my five true men? By 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 187 

the Doom, Carlisle, I sometimes wonder if there 
is any ” 

“Hush, father, don’t say that!” beseeched 
Joan, divining what was in his mind. 

“What about Richelieu?” asked Carlisle, by 
way of diversion. “Is he getting along as well 
as he was?” 

“Yes, he is. There’s more irony for you. 
The wound in his neck is healed, and he’s practi- 
cally over the fever although he complains of 
weakness in the back and won’t move much off 
his chair. Why couldn’t my honest Mason be 
convalescing in his place, and why couldn’t the 
cursed murderer of Mason and the rest be carried 
out into the forest to-night?” 

“You’re going to take them out to-night, 
then?” 

“Yes, Andrews says it should be done at once 
so as to kill all further risk, and he also says 
we’ll have to take fresh clothes and cleansing 
baths and then put a torch to the post. It’s 
impossible to clean it and I can soon rebuild with 
plenty of logs at hand. 

“Yes, they must go out to-night. The other 
four bodies are in the fur house. Andrews and 
I will carry them, of course, but — but could I 
ask you to make things ready out there, Car- 
lisle?” 

“Yes, Wayne, yes — certainly!” agreed Car- 
lisle. “I’ll go right over to Cumberland House 
and get the men. You’ll have time to eat your 
dinner before we’re ready.” 

“Thanks, Carlisle. I haven’t much appetite. 


188 


AMBUSH 


but I can’t refuse what my girl has prepared. 
And you’d better stay at the post, Joan. You’d 
better not come into the forest. It’ll be no sight 
for young eyes like yours!” 

“Still, I’ll come, father!” declared Joan. “I 
would always regret it if I didn’t. I loved them 
all, just as you did.” 

“Well, well, whatever you think, girl!” he 
nodded, turning back into the post. “In about 
an hour or so!” 

The dance was swinging, the music thrilling, 
vibrant, lusty, care-free when Carlisle and Joan 
returned to the trading-room of Cumberland 
House, but a word to Galt and the shuffling feet 
stilled, the violins ceased with a whine of protest. 

Seizing their outer garments, the men followed 
the chief trader, many taking torches and axes 
from the store. Lewis, at Carlisle’s request, 
put his bagpipes under his arm, and all poured 
out across the snow to the big clearing in the 
woods where the winter’s fuel had been gathered. 

There they set to work under Galt, laying dry 
branches in layers, each layer crossing at right 
angles the one beneath as in the end towers of 
the near-by piles of cord wood. Upon the 
branches they heaped the cordwood itself, 
lengths of dry, dead birch and resinous pine — 
slivery, pitch-soaked, extremely inflammable, 
bulking hugely high above men’s heads. 

When the work was nearly finished Joan and 
Carlisle crossed to the gate of the Free-Trade 
post to tell Wayne all was ready, but he and 
Andrews were at that moment coming out of the 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 189 

fur-house doorway which Richelieu held open 
for them. 

The Northwester could see the two at the 
entrance, but he offered no greeting. Silently 
he held the door out of the way and shambled 
up the steps, with an axe handle used as a cane 
to support his weak limbs ; closing the door again 
when Wayne and Andrews inched forth their 
pole stretcher with the long, still figure upon it. 

“Is he coming, father?” whispered Joan. 

“No, thank Heaven!” gritted Wayne. “He 
says it’s too cold and too far for him to walk.” 

Five times they made the out trip, four times 
the back trip, before the row of bodies upon the 
pile of cordwood was complete. Then Carlisle’s 
men touched torches to the bottom branches in 
many places and stepped back as Andrews began 
to read the burial service. 

The flames mounted and grew, reddening the 
snow, silhouetting the forest trees, painting the 
white and Indian faces staring up at the five 
fever-shattered, pox-pitted, rigescent bodies of 
men who had been true. 

The world turned back a thousand years, and 
like a pagan crowd of ancients the motley horde 
of Northmen watched the funeral pyre blaze. 
Men and women alike thronged about, all of 
Cumberland House, all of the Cree tribes, even 
the old squaws whose mission it was to tend the 
fires in the bivouacs. The only two souls miss- 
ing were Richelieu, shut up alone in Fort Wayne, 
and Burning Cloud, guarding its open gate. 

Andrews’ “Amen” rang out sonorously* 


190 


AMBUSH 


Across the momentary silence that followed 
trembled the throbbing of the fire, Joan’s stifled 
sobbing, the wailing of Lewis’ dirge, the weird 
death chant of the Cree women, while overhead 
sounded the solemn harp of the aurora, some 
unseen Hand pulsating its golden strings! 

“Hoo — ah — h — h! Hoo— ah— h— h!” the 
squaws quavered. 

They mourned these true men as they 
mourned their own dead of the tribes, and their 
wailing shrilled eerily in the ears of Wayne and 
Andrews, of Joan and Carlisle, plodding back 
in pairs toward Fort Wayne. 

Of the four Carlisle was the most mentally 
alert. His was the first observant glimpse of 
the Fort Wayne gate, and as he glimpsed it, he 
gave a startled exclamation and leaped forward 
in front of the others. No tall, dark form showed 
in sentinel pose in the opening, but prone upon 
the snow lay the sprawling figure of a man. 

“Burning Cloud!” burst out Carlisle as he 
bent over and examined him. “Stunned with 
an axe handle! Look — there it is beside him in 
the snow!” 

“By the Doom!” exploded Wayne, rushing 
up with the rest. “It’s Richelieu’s work. The 
shamming skunk! Too cold for him to go into 
the forest! Too far to walk, eh? Condemna- 
tion, he’s been biding his time, just waiting his 
chance, Carlisle, and I’ve given it to him.” 

“But where under the dome of heaven does 
he hope to hide, Paul?” demanded Andrews, 
breathlessly. 


OOCHEMEGOU KESIGOW 


191 


Carlisle was reading the signs. He saw where 
Burning Cloud had been standing upon a drift, 
the toes of his snowshoes pointing forestward, 
no doubt staring at the distant glare of the 
furneral pyre and listening to the death chant of 
his people when he was struck down by a blow 
from behind. 

His rifle and snowshoes were gone, and Car- 
lisle, bent double as he scanned the crust, nosed 
about like a hound to find the tracks of the shoes 
striking out from the muddle of prints about the 
gateway. 

They were the long, slim shoes of the Cree 
runner. There had been no others like them 
near Fort Wayne that day, and presently Carlisle 
discovered where they had struck the softer 
snows in a scent-breaking, fifteen-foot jump out 
from the packed area about the entrance. 

“No weak man’s jump, that!” he pointed 
out to the rest. “And those strides aren’t the 
strides of a weak man, either!” 

He indicated the marks of Richelieu’s shoes 
where the Northwester had run upon the tracks 
he and Joan had made in coming over from 
Cumberland House. It was plain that Riche- 
lieu’s purpose had been to confuse trails and 
throw any tracker off the scent, but Carlisle was 
never at fault. 

He skimmed rapidly ahead, Joan gliding at 
his side, Wayne and Andrews keeping their 
distance farther back but equally anxious to see 
the results of the trailing. 

The tracks led straight toward the Cree biv- 


192 


AMBUSH 


ouacs, toward the snow-walled quadrangles 
glowing pink under the blazing fires within. 

“He’s hiding in the teepees somewhere, Joan,” 
breathed Carlisle, “waiting till the woods are 
clear. You’d better drop back. He’s armed, 
and he’ll likely shoot on sight.” 

Then Carlisle’s shoes struck the snowbanked 
side of the end quadrangle, sending the flakes 
hissing into the fire, and instantaneously the 
truth struck home to him. There had not been 
a hunter or a squaw in the whole camp to menace 
or alarm a pillager. 

Soaring Eagle’s dogs, the splendid 150-pound 
Hudson’s Bays, the swiftest dogs in Carlisle’s 
district, the animals no other post team could 
pretend to overtake, were gone from their former 
place by the fire. 

Soaring Eagle’s up-ended cariole, too, was 
gone, and yonder was the white furrow of it 
streaking off in the direction that led up the 
Saskatchewan. 

“Escaped!” breathed Joan. “But be care- 
ful, Paul. Maybe he has spread the plague 
here as he tried to do once before!” 

“No, thank Heaven, his tracks don’t go any 
farther than this fire. He hadn’t time to enter 
the main bivouac, you see, Joan. It took him 
all his time to get the harness on those five big 
brutes and get away. He has barely done it, 
for the cariole furrow hasn’t yet hardened in the 
frost!” 


CHAPTER TWELVE 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 

Winter’s waning they sensed first in the 
flutter of ptarmigan flocks back from the Takipi 
Hills, in the drift of the phantom caribou herds 
down from the Barren Lands, in the lengthen- 
ing days, the receding horizon which drew away 
into infinite remoteness, the rampant winds 
which snow-smoked that far horizon but died 
in a strange vacuum over the bosom of Pine 
Island Lake itself. 

All about Cumberland House the Northern 
world burned incandescent, lurid; shot through 
and through, earth, air, and sky, with weird 
shafts of colour. The snows were billowy seas 
of coral with the bloody sunsets lying on them 
like islands of rubies. 

The atmosphere was a mystic veil, to-day a 
shower of diamond dust, to-morrow a silver 
vapour, the next day the gossamer cloak of a 
sleeping glacier chrysoberyl-stained upon a web 
of hoar frost. And sheer from the dome of 
heaven to the line of the snows banked the deep 
purple clouds, like regal hangings in an ancient 
temple with the mock suns peering through as 
eyes of the priests of the sacrifice were wont to 
peer. 


193 


194 


AMBUSH 


Yet there came no vernal transition, no slow 
travail of nature bringing forth new life. Only 
the purple tapestries and the peering eyes dis- 
solved one day, and in their place floated tur- 
quoise skies and cirrous clouds painted with the 
eeriest sight Northern eyes may see. 

Joan was the first to notice, straying to the 
door of the Factor’s house while her father, 
Andrews, and Carlisle talked and smoked the 
bright evening away before the fireplace in the 
council-room. 

Now the sun set late. Jealous daylight claimed 
many hours of the former dark, and upon this 
evening the low sun was screened behind a fan 
of ground fog shooting up a half circle of crim- 
son spokes rimmed by a golden felloe. Yet it 
was not the fantastic sunset but the weird sky 
itself that called forth Joan’s excited cry and 
brought the others to her side. 

“Look!” she murmured in a tone of awe. 
“Did you ever see such unnatural beauty?” 

“By Heavens, a mirage!” exclaimed Carlisle. 
“A mirage of the South!” 

For before their uplifted eyes, as if it lay out 
yonder upon the bare snows or just over the 
needle-tufted pines, stretched the open waters 
of the Great Lakes and the verdant land to the 
southward. What a charm of colour, what a 
mellow sweep of warmth they beheld ! 

Chrysoprase green the waters shimmered, 
frothed with the crests of the surges, edged with 
the pearly foam of pounded beaches, while afar 
spread the silver ribbons of rivers, the fat, 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 


195 


grassed fields, the groves of leafed trees, the 
acres of orchard bloom. Almost could they hear 
the cries of children at play under the showering 
petals, catch the drone of the hived bees, feel the 
hot-lipped southern winds kissing their faces 
like the passionate caress of their own febrile 
Chinook. 

"It’s spring !” declared Carlisle. “It’s blos- 
somy spring down there.” 

“Yes, it’s spring on the Wyoming Valley — 
see!” urged Wayne, his fawn-green eyes burning 
raptly, his abnormally long arm pointing out his 
homeland in the sky picture as one would lay a 
finger upon an unrolled map. “It’s spring, and 
it’s a sign. By the Doom, a sign that I’m going 
back!” 

Carlisle and Andrews were silent. 

The tears flooded to Joan’s eyes. 

They all stared mutely while the mirage faded 
as quickly as it had appeared and sombre clouds 
slipped over with the motion of a hand wiping 
away the drawing from a slate. 

Wayne’s eye went dark with the sky. He 
groped for the doorway as they turned inside 
and sat down in his chair before the fireplace, 
his head in his hands, gazing into the glowing 
embers as one who sees old scenes in pageant. 

Within an hour the rain came — the warm, 
steaming, smiting rain that had lurked for 
weeks in the purple cloud banks, and all night 
it poured, gushed, fell in torrents, sweeping the 
snows like a magic broom, brimming ice-bound 
lake and river with the leaping waters of life. 


196 


AMBUSH 


Companioning it came the Chinook, stealing 
a march in the dark, ravishing the naked woods, 
stirring the pulse primordial in the heart of the 
waking earth. 

Morning revealed a world aflood, the ice jams 
flying, the Saskatchewan in rampage, hurling 
the glut of a thousand streams down to Lake 
Winnipeg. Spring! It burst like prison doors 
for prisoners long confined. It came like a 
swift reprieve to mourners of one doomed. 
Spring! The air was one vast fly way of wild' 
fowl winging north. 

As rivers run to the sea, as men seek their own 
hearth fires, so these whizzing wedges returned 
to the nests that fledged them, the ducks to their 
million marshes, the Canada geese to their 
Hudson Bay shores, the wavies to their name- 
less Arctic islands. 

While the ice runs reeled along, the willows 
budded beside them. While the muskegs shed 
their frozen skins, the wild rose clothed their 
starkness. While the melting snows uncarpeted 
the forest floor, the nymph-like flowers spread 
over it their rugs of matchless hue. Spring! 
The incomparable thrill and verve and urge of 
it ! It surged in all living things from the human 
occupants of Cumberland House to the singing 
bluebirds in the tree-tops and the whining mos- 
quitoes in the swamp. 

The breaking of the forest trails meant the 
cutting off of all communication in the North- 
land till the floods had subsided sufficiently for 
the frail canoes to breast them. Carlisle had 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 


197 


had no word from James Bay. If word had not 
been sent out by trippers before the snows broke, 
it might not arrive in time to let him know the 
situation in the other districts. The lack of 
such knowledge was a severe handicap. 

The governor always kept his promises strictly 
and he wondered what had happened to prevent 
a message getting through. But even while he 
worried, a lone Indian canoeman, daring the 
running ice, drove up the Saskatchewan over 
the lessening flood and threw a dispatch bag 
upon Carlisle’s desk. 

“You are Flaming Torch from the bay post 
of York Factory,” identified Carlisle, scanning 
him keenly, “but you have not come from the 
bay by canoe. I know that.” 

“No,” explained Flaming Torch, “I came by 
dog team. The trail was slow with the melting 
snows, and the floods caught me at the Pas. 
I had to wait for the ice to run. Then I came 
on with a canoe from the post.” 

“Stay here,” Carlisle directed him. “I may 
have a message to send back right away.” 

He knew Wayne and Andrews were out some- 
where along the swollen river, so he took the dis- 
patches over to his house to have privacy while 
reading them, but when he opened the council- 
room door Joan sat there. 

“What is it, Paul?” she asked, looking up 
from the book she was reading. 

“Dispatches,” he replied with satisfaction. 
“I’ve looked for them a long time. Don’t let 
me disturb you, though. Go on with your read- 


198 


AMBUSH 


ing. I’ll just glance over them and get the 
news.” 

Most of them were documents of the ordinary 
post routine, things that would come under the 
jurisdiction and execution of Galt and his clerks, 
but finally he came to one of greater import. 

The sweeping chirography he recognized as 
the governor’s own handwriting, and it was ad- 
dressed: Chief District Factor Carlisle, Cum- 
berland House, Cumberland District, via Nor- 
way House. Also it was marked Important , 
and Carlisle tore it open with eager hands. It 
was written in conversational style, and the body 
of it ran: 

All the Upper Country is a hell of smallpox! Between 
that and trade war, all of the Free-Trade and the majority 
of the Northwest posts are wiped out. As far as the latest 
dispatches by runners point out, the Northwest posts of 
James and Roderick McKenzie, McLeod, McDougall, 
Todd, McGillivray, and Sager are the only ones left. 
These posts are very strong, as many of the other posts 
evacuated and fell in on them. 

I have temporarily closed all our posts in the infected 
districts and freighted out the fur by the Churchill River, 
using dog teams for the purpose before the river broke. 
The Northwesters have made no move, and beyond a 
doubt the McKenzies and the rest will try to come down 
the Saskatchewan as usual in the spring. 

You must stop them. They must not go through. I 
hope you are strong enough as you stand and have escaped 
the plague. If not, I can perhaps get you reinforcements 
up in time. Everything here on the bay is much the same. 
The past winter has been a severe one, and it may be I 
shall not endure another. My health is failing greatly, and 
I think I may ask for a change in the spring. Let me 
know your prospects by the runner who carries this! 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 


199 


As Carlisle raised his eyes from his reading he 
caught the gaze of Joan bent upon him across 
the table. 

" What is the news, Paul? ” she asked, earnestly. 
"Is it betraying confidences or trade secrets to tell 
me?” 

"No, Joan, there’s nothing in it you shouldn’t 
know about,” he assured her, handing the dis- 
patch over the board. "You may read it for 
yourself. I’m sorry it confirms our worst news 
about your father’s posts. Soaring Eagle’s 
words were true. They’re all gone, it seems. 
The Northwesters fared somewhat better.” 

Joan quickly read the dispatch, and Carlisle 
saw the soft gleam of commiseration spring into 
her eyes. 

"I was afraid — so dreadfully afraid!” she 
exclaimed. "Now I know. I know what I 
haven’t the heart to tell him. But it doesn’t 
make any mention of Richelieu, Paul. Do you 
think he’ll have reached any of these posts that 
remain unaffected?” 

"He has certainly reached one of them,” 
Carlisle emphatically declared. "He had the 
very best of dogs, and it wouldn’t take him 
long to reach, say, Todd’s post.” 

"Then perhaps he’ll warn them not to come 
down the Saskatchewan. Perhaps they’ll try 
some other ruse or else hold their furs over for 
another year.” 

Carlisle shook his head. 

"They won’t do that,” he prophesied. "Furs 
held over are not so profitable as if marketed at 


200 


AMBUSH 


once. Then, they have to go to Grande Portage 
for next year’s supplies. Besides, Richelieu is 
a bully and a fighter, no coward whatever. No- 
body need warn him off, and he won’t warn 
anybody else off. 

“Even if any of the other partners object and 
want to play a safer game, he’ll smash their ob- 
jections. I know Simon Richelieu. He’ll come, 
and he’ll have all the Northwest brigades under 
his command. Further than that, Joan, don’t 
you realize how much depends on my scattering 
his brigades here? If I should lose — ” 

“ Don’t, Paul; don’t mention that possibility ! ” 
cried Joan. 

She was half out of her chair, her face all 
flushed, leaning over the table toward him, her 
hands planted on the litter of dispatches. i 

“Don’t mention it, please! It would bring 
misfortune, I’m sure. I’ve learned to be super- 
stitious in this North, you see. Yes, I was a 
fool to say he wouldn’t come. He will come. 
And Paul, Paul — you must not lose!” 

Carlisle’s fingers closed on hers, outspread 
upon the papers. 

“By the God of Northmen, Joan,” he vowed, 
“I will not lose!” 

The magnetic pressure of his hands told more 
than the mere words. Joan, with a radiant smile, 
slowly withdrew her hands and dropped back 
into her chair, still following his movements with 
her eyes as he set about writing the answer to the 
governor’s dispatch. 

When he had finished he looked up. 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 


201 


“ Would you like to read it, Joan? ” he asked. 
“Yes, I would like to, Paul,” she confessed, 
“that is, if it is the same as the other — if it is 
proper that I should read it.” 

“It’s all right for you to see it, girl. Here!” 
Joan took the paper and read: 

I have your dispatch via Norway House, although it was 
somewhat delayed en route. The break-up of the river 
caught the courier at the Pas, and he had to lie up with 
the dogs and come on at the first opportunity by canoe. 
This circumstance would have made it a question whether 
reinforcements could have reached here in time had I 
needed them, but luckily I do not. 

Besides my own men, Galt’s strong following which was 
here when I arrived, and the crews of the two fleets of York 
boats whom I have retained, I am drawing in all the forces 
of the other posts with all the Indians of those sections. 
The Indians are loyal and numerous, and thus I shall have 
a preponderance of men. As regards the smallpox, it has 
been here. In fact, it started here in a manner I shall 
explain when I reach James Bay. 

Both Northwesters and Free-Traders fled from it, burn- 
ing Richelieu’s post as they fled, except Richelieu, Wayne, 
and five of Wayne’s men. In isolation at Fort Wayne the 
five Free-Traders died with it, Richelieu recovering and 
managing to escape up the Saskatchewan. Fort Wayne 
we fired so as to leave no possibility of the disease spreading 
here. 

I have given Wayne quarters at Cumberland House, 
although we thought it best not to tell him the extent of his 
losses yet, he is such a strange and moody man. There 
has been no infection at Cumberland House. Everything 
is in the usual shape, and fur has been plentiful. I shall 
stop the Northwest brigades here and then go down to 
Grande Portage. 

The Northwesters have claimed the ground there and 
closed the Portage, and thus the Pigeon River route, to any 


202 


AMBUSH 


but their own voyageurs. I myself had to make a dash up 
the Kaministiquia coming in. You can understand that 
it is supremely in our interests to contest that claim with- 
out delay, before undisputed closing of it gives them excuse 
for holding it under a ruling of the corrupt Montreal courts. 

So I shall pass over the ground to avoid the claim and 
come home to the bay via the Michipicoten, the Missinabie, 
and the Moose. I am sorry to hear you have been troubled 
in health but trust to find you much improved when next 
I pay my respects. 


“Well, Joan?” he questioned when she looked 
up with the light of surprise upon her face. 

“You are going down to Grande Portage, 
Paul? I thought you would go down to James 
Bay by the Hayes River?” 

“No,” he responded, “if I stopped Riche- 
lieu’s brigades here and then went down the 
Hayes, my work would be only half done. I am 
going to open up Grande Portage, and by the 
God of Northmen, Joan, you are going with me ! ” 

That day the courier Flaming Torch departed 
down the river. The next day the men of the 
other posts came up, Lewis from the Pas, Lea 
from the Nepowin, Garry from Moose Lake, 
Hampton from Chimawawin, Jarvis from Grand 
Rapids. 

They brought all the Indians of their sections 
to add to Carlisle’s strength, and Jarvis, his 
Cockney nose tilted skyward in pride, drove 
up with his own crew the Factor’s great craft 
which had been left at Grand Rapids when the 
river froze. 

“See the bloomin’ Rajah ride!” he grinned, 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 


203 


doffing his cap to the crowd on shore. “Some 
d’y I’ll command one of my own. Just mark 
wot I s’y.” 

He had with him Soaring Eagle’s tribe — the 
up-Saskatchewan Indians who had elected to 
hunt about Lake Winnipeg when driven out by 
the plague — laden with a fresh catch of fur. The 
fur went in in trade, and these were the busy 
hours, hours filled with life and movement, sound 
and colour after the ghostly desolation and 
silence of the winter. 

Never an hour went by, day or night, but some 
new fleet of canoes touched prows upon the Pine 
Island Lake shore, some new family pitched 
camp and swelled the teepee city round about 
Cumberland House. 

Out of the eastern and western arms they 
came, off the Sturgeon and the Carrot rivers, 
from Lakes Namew, Amisk, Goose, Athapus- 
cow, foregathering after custom immemorial, 
spiralling the blazing skies with their camp 
smokes, filling the balmy air with liquid language 
that lisped like the moist spring wind or gurgled 
like the waters. 

They were all in, every man upon the trade 
books, every Hudson’s Bay hunter in the district 
with their squaws, papooses, dogs, and household 
gods. The only outpost remaining was Wells’s 
camp on the Seepanock Channel. 

Wells’s men Carlisle had not drawn in like 
the others. On the contrary, he had added to 
the Seepanock Channel force, bidding Wells re- 
double his vigilance with the opening of the 


204 


AMBUSH 


stream and giving him explicit orders as to what 
course he must pursue when the Northwesters 
came down. 

Nor was the significance of these preparations 
lost upon Wayne. They marked, as it were, the 
breaking of the truce enforced between him and 
Carlisle by the smallpox outbreak. They loomed 
upon his conception as a final menace to 
his interests and he became morose, moody, 
brooding over Carlisle’s actions and his ancient 
wrongs, watching for the Free-Trading brigades 
he hoped to see come driving down the Saskat- 
chewan, and grimly waiting for that moment 
when there would be no further truce and he 
and Carlisle must decisively settle accounts. 

The ice run was practically past. Vagrant 
floes spun by on the turgid waters, but their very 
solitary journeying told Carlisle that the mighty 
highway was open. Even back to the tiniest 
feeders in the foothills of the Rockies the way 
was clear, and the Northwesters were doubtless 
driving down. They might come by daylight 
or dark, to-day, to-morrow; there was no telling, 
but it was well to be prepared. 

Carlisle went up to the Seepanock Channel 
and personally posted Wells’s men both in the 
hills across the Saskatchewan and in the low 
scrub round the channel opening itself. A mile 
inland the channel had been heavily barricaded 
as a necessary precaution, but no evidence of 
Hudson’s Bay forces being in possession was 
visible from the main stream. 

“Keep out of sight,” Carlisle adjured Wells. 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 


205 


“Don’t let them get a glimpse of any of your 
men. If they enter the channel, rush and hold 
them till I can get up the river to help you. If 
they go by, make sure that it is not a ruse and 
then follow them on to me as fast as you can.” 

“Yez, Factor,” Wells assured him, “I zhall 
make zertain o’ that. You zhall zee!” 

Carlisle dropped down stream again below the 
muddle of straggling islands, below the scramble 
of rapids, below the twisted knot of river bends 
known as the Coiled Snakes, to a spot where the 
Saskatchewan narrowed not a great distance 
from Cumberland House. 

Here the park lands met the ruder forest in a 
series of rolling bluffs and low plateaus, a bold 
promontory crowding the river into a twisted, 
sombre chasm. Close by the rim of the chasm 
and up on the slopes shouldered the jostling 
spruce, and against these high trees Carlisle sent 
his men with their axes. 

To the swinging steel the spruce trees swung 
and snapped, plunging like the thrown spears 
of Titans into the river beneath. They criss- 
crossed and lodged and jammed, piling trunk 
on trunk, seining the vagrant floes that drifted 
down, forming a stubborn wall against the angry, 
roaring river. 

The dammed flood rose a foot, two feet, three 
feet; but the matted barrier held, while, high 
above, Carlisle and his axemen rained down the 
trunks till the sullen tide backed round the face 
of the promontory and gave up the fight. Beaten, 
it slunk out the easier way, over the bank 


206 


AMBUSH 


through the Devil’s Elbow, a broad, barren 
valley that seemed to have been an ancient 
beaver meadow. 

Owing to the width of the valley the yellow 
flood flowed no deeper than a man’s waist, sweep- 
ing in a majestic curve of three miles or more 
back to the well-nigh-drained Saskatchewan’s 
bed. As the waters rolled ruminatively through, 
they raised something inch by inch upon their 
rippling surface, a dark line across the molten 
gold, a triple boom of logs securely roped to giant 
pines on either benchland. 

Ralph Wayne heard the axes ringing, saw the 
Saskatchewan temporarily draining, and ran 
out to where Carlisle was at work. He glimpsed 
the dammed chasm, the boom of logs across the 
Devil’s Elbow, and his fawn-green eyes blazed 
with their old inimical light into Carlisle’s. 

“Condemnation! You close the Saskatche- 
wan, Carlisle?” he exploded. 

“So it seems, Wayne,” returned Carlisle, 
quietly. 

“To my brigades?” 

“No, to the Northwest brigades.” 

“But what’s the difference? You close the 
waterway, and you stop all who travel down. 
By the Doom, do you think I will stand by and 
see it done?” 

Carlisle’s gray eyes looked steadily into 
Wayne’s blazing ones where he stood upon the 
end of the boom, and as he gazed, the Factor 
seemed to see back into those far-gone years 
which had moulded the man so harshly. 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 


207 


With strange occult vision he saw the pall 
of smoke and the sweep of pillage through the 
Wyoming Valley and Wayne’s long pilgrimage 
into the North with his child of four. He sensed 
the vision and dream that had lured Wayne in 
his loneliness to do what many another adven- 
turer had failed to do, to blaze the trail of empire 
beyond the Missouri. 

Carlisle saw, felt the greatness of Wayne’s 
dissolving dream, and there was no enmity in 
his heart, nothing but regret and pity, and he 
laid an earnest hand on the Free-Trader’s arm. 

“ On my honour, Wayne, this move has nothing 
to do with you!” he assured him. 

“You won’t try to hold my brigades, then?” 
flashed the incredulous Wayne. “You’ll let 
them pass around when they come? ” 

Carlisle hesitated, then nodded, helplessly. 

“If — if they come,” he evaded, “I’ll put out 
no hand to stop them.” 

“If!” blurted Wayne. “What in creation 
have you up your sleeve? Do you think my 
men aren’t as loyal as yours? Just because some 
of the drunken curs joined in the rout like sheep 
when they got the smallpox scare, you needn’t 
class them all as that. Look at Mason. Look 
at Murdock, and the rest. Had you ever truer 
men under your red flag?” 

“No, none truer than those,” admitted Car- 
lisle. “None truer in all the world for that mat- 
ter!” 

Wayne shrugged his shoulders darkly as he 
turned away again. 


208 


AMBUSH 


“Then that settles it,” he growled. “They’ll 
come all right, and when they take passage 
through here, they take it for all time, Carlisle. 
Either that or ” 

He finished his sentence with a shake of his 
head that was more sinister than any spoken 
threat. 

Gravely, without answering his threat, Car- 
lisle watched him striding back to the post before 
he turned to give final directions to his men. 
Some dozen he appointed to work in two shifts, 
walking the triple boom with poles in their hands 
deflecting the drifting ice so that it would squeeze 
under and leave the barrier clear. 

The rest he split into two camps to bivouac 
upon the benchlands at either end of the boom, 
ready at the coming of the sleepless scouts he had 
posted here and there all the way up river to the 
Seepanock Channel. There was nothing more 
to be done but wait. The long twilight of the 
northern evening had crept in upon the comple- 
tion of the day’s work, and through the dusk 
Carlisle followed in Wayne’s footsteps back to 
Cumberland House. 

In the deepest dark before the dawn Wells’s 
scout, Spotted Deer, a Cree Indian of tremen- 
dous endurance and skill, fell in upon him, breath- 
less and sweating. 

“They come!” he grunted in Cree, spent with 
his running. “Many canoes. Many voices 
of white men, the French Company’s men singing 
to their paddles.” 

Instantly Wells struck fire with his flint and 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 209 

steel to the dry birchbark heaped beside him 
on the hillside, and blew it into flame. 

The flare was hidden by the bulge of the hill 
from any one up-river, but could be readily 
seen by an appointed eye in an appointed place 
down-river. As Wells strained his eyes into the 
dark, he caught the answering flare a mile or two 
below, a bright flame and unmistakable but no 
larger than a handful of fireflies held on high by 
a sportive boy. 

Immediately Wells smothered his flame with 
earth, and far down he saw the second flare go 
out and knew that his message was speeding 
swifter than the swiftest bird. 

All the way along the Saskatchewan from is- 
land to island, from headland to headland, from 
hill to hill the red eyes glowed and winked out 
in the dark, and the last one glared for Waseya- 
win stationed upon the steep benchland above 
the Hudson’s Bay men’s bivouacs. Swiftly 
Waseyawin lit his torch and waved it in answer. 
The far spark died in the gloom. He dashed 
the torch into the soft muck and bounded down 
the hillside. 

“The men of Black-beard are coming!” he 
cried to the drowsy camp. “The sign of the 
fire flashed through the night to me. They 
will be here with the winged dawn. I, Waseya- 
win, have spoke it. Ae, and I go to tell the 
Factor.” 

Like wraiths the Hudson’s Bay men arose from 
wherever they lay, from bough beds on the 
ground, from the canopy of the bushes, from the 


210 


AMBUSH 


tents spread in desperation to keep off the plague 
of mosquitoes. 

They stepped forth, shadowy, vague, throng- 
ing like ghosts in the dark that would soon break 
to show the stern, bronzed faces of Northmen 
sculptured by the chisel of daring. Among 
them the chief trader Galt moved his heavily 
built body, ordering, directing, posting them 
in their allotted positions. 

“Go across the valley, Eugene,” he begged 
Drummond, “and let them know what we 
know. It is good to be ready when the Factor 
comes.” 

Amid the low, musical night roar of the waters 
flowing under the boom and the spaced thud 
of ice cakes smiting the logs, Drummond’s moc- 
casins pat-patted across on the wet bark. He 
gave the word to the polers as he passed, and, in 
a few minutes, more ghostly forms were throng- 
ing in the bivouac at the other end of the boom. 

Waseyawin waited for none of these things. 
He ran as the deer run, the tang of the dank 
night air and the smell of the young earth throb- 
bing in his nostrils and setting his primitive 
blood a-leap, making straight for Cumberland 
House. 

Up the trampled shore he sped and through 
the sleeping city of teepees, setting the curs to 
howling and stirring the tribes from their dream- 
ing of forest dreams. They cried out to him to 
know if he was Maunobosho or Nenaubosho 
stalking through the night, but he heeded them 
not. 


THE SORCERY OF SPRING 211 

Through the open gate of the palisades he 
darted and across the dark stockade ground. 
He knew there was no use in going to the Fac- 
tor’s house, for he had seen that only Wayne, 
his daughter, and Father Andrews were sleeping 
there. The Factor’s bed was in the trading- 
room, and, dispensing with all custom in the 
urgency of the moment, Waseyawin sprang up 
the steps and opened the door. 

Carlisle lay upon the temporary bed behind 
his desk, sunk in a deep sleep after the long day’s 
toil. He did not hear the almost soundless feet 
of his bowsman, did not wake till he felt the 
Indian fingers laid softly and respectfully upon 
his cheek. 

66 Koos koos kwa, Factor!’ cried Waseyawin. 
“Wake up! The eyes of fire winked through 
the dark to me, and after the eyes will the sun 
flash upon the paddles of the men of the French 
Company.” 

“It is well, Waseyawin,” spoke Carlisle in 
Cree, mentally alert the moment he was awake. 
“Go among your people in their teepees and 
gather the hunters. Take them with you to the 
Devil’s Elbow to strengthen my men. I will 
not be far behind you.” 


CHAPTER THIRTEEN 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 

Making ready his weapons as he went, Car- 
lisle ran forth from the trading-room. The stars 
were gone as he glanced upward. The sky was 
graying, and above the eastern forest-line the 
lemon forelights of the dawn were gleaming. 

Outside the stockade the Indian teepees 
buzzed like a vast colony of bees. Waseyawin 
had already hurried the hunters away but their 
womenkind were hissing the news of impending 
trouble about and scurrying off to the slope above 
the Devil’s Elbow where they might see their 
lords give battle. Carlisle’s swift feet passed 
many of them on the way, and as he came to the 
steep of the benchland, the vivid picture of the 
valley below spread sharp and clear before his eyes. 

Through the great gut of greening hills, along 
their scarred earth faces, rocky outcrops, and 
scrubby slopes, rolled the slumbrous sheet of 
golden-coloured water. Its vagrant floes had 
found the gouged earth an easy place to lodge, 
and there shimmering acres of ice were stranded, 
ghostly white in the growing light. Above hung 
the furry buds and opened leaves of the willows, 
the lacy, climbing birches; and over all the regal, 
scornful spruce pricking stiffly into the lemon sky. 

212 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 


213 


Clusters of tents marked the ends of the boom, 
drawn like a black triple cable across the golden 
flood and fretting it into a snarling line of foam 
where the flow plunged under. Round the tents 
and scattered across the long boom he marked 
his waiting forces, all the swarthy hunters 
Waseyawin had marshalled, all the Hudson’s Bay 
white men, half-breeds, and resident Indians 
of Cumberland House and the other district 
posts. 

Yonder was Waseyawin himself, moving on 
the boom with the snaky slouch of the Crees, 
Missowa the Ojibway standing tall, strong, 
straight as a lance. 

There were all the rest of his officers posed on 
the logs, their physical characteristics infallibly 
betraying their identities even at that distance — 
Galt’s stocky body, Drummond’s eagle profile 
and raven hair, Lewis’s hoaiy head, Lea’s slim 
Highland figure, Jarvis’s nervous shuffle, Hamp- 
ton’s fleshy bulk, Garry’s squat limbs and flam- 
ing red beard. 

Even as he looked, Carlisle saw Eugene point 
up the majestic curve of the Devil’s Elbow, saw 
the hands of the row of men on the boom drop 
to their hips and belts and curl up under their 
armpits for the handy weapons. There was 
something coming on the rolling flood. The 
out jut of the pines across the shoulder of the 
slope shut out his own view of the curve, but 
Carlisle knew that Eugene and the rest had 
sighted their enemies. 

In long, slipping, coasting strides he slid down 


214 


AMBUSH 


the benchland upon his wet moccasins and ran 
out on the boom beside his brigade leader. 

“Ba gar, here dey be come!” shrilled Eugene, 
still pointing, and Carlisle sighted over his hand 
to glimpse the Northwest brigades sweeping 
round the promontory. 

The jam of trees and ice in the narrow chasm 
was not the first jam they had avoided in their 
long journey down that roaring waterway. They 
followed the Saskatchewan wherever it went, 
and in the natural diversion of things they came 
driving over the broad, unobstructed yellow 
flood that eddied round the Devil’s Elbow. 

Black as Stygian craft the canoes loomed in 
the shadow of the headland, but as they passed 
the headland the first sapphire shafts of the 
dawnlight struck them glinting from the canoe 
sides, flashing from the dipping paddles, para- 
doxically investing the white and Indian faces 
with nebulous, pearly halos. 

In the sudden blaze of light Carlisle recog- 
nized the faces, the men of every craft: James 
and Roderick McKenzie, McLeod and Mc- 
Dougall with their Athabasca brigades, Todd 
from Fort des Prairies, McGillivray and Sager 
from Fond du Lac. The governor’s informa- 
tion had been accurate. Not a man he had 
named was missing. 

Todd’s canoe was in front, and as it ap- 
proached the boom, Carlisle saw a man rise to 
his feet and plant a flagstaff in the curving bow. 

The banner of the Northwesters broke on the 
morning wind, and behind its rippling folds he 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 


215 


beheld Richelieu, stiff as a ramrod in the swaying 
craft, resplendent in his uniform of a colonel, 
his grinning black-bearded face hideously pox- 
pitted, more like the face of the devil than ever! 

“Long live the Northwest Company!” he 
cried, and like an echo his forces took up the 
Northwest watch-cry: “Fortitude in distress!” 
their cheering drowning the roaring of the river. 

Carlisle stooped to pick up a spike-ended 
shaft that lay at his feet on the boom. With 
a strong darting thrust he drove the spike into 
the logs, and the shaft oscillated there, shaking 
out the blood-red emblem of the Hudson’s Bay 
Company and Carlisle’s own streaming gonfalon, 
the gonfalon that had come undimmed through 
fire and flood, through famine and plague, 
through all the hazards of the Northland. 

“Pro Pelle Cutem /” he shouted, antagonisti- 
cally, and the bellow of the Hudson’s Bay giants 
set the high hill-tops quaking. 

“Long live the Northwest Company!” 

“A skin for a skin!” they boomed in a dia- 
pason of terrible strength. “Long live the 
H. B. C.!” 

“By the Doom, yes, and to perdition with 
Richelieu and his cursed Northwesters!” shrilled 
a wild voice ashore. 

Carlisle glanced over his shoulder to see the 
tall form of Wayne dashing out upon the boom 
and behind him Joan, her pale face paler with 
excitement, her spun-gold hair flying in the 
breeze, calling him back in vain. Behind Joan 
ran Andrews, holding the skirts of his cassock. 


216 


AMBUSH 


his mosquito-veil flapping over his face at every 
stride. 

Wayne impetuously zigzagged through the 
line of men to Carlisle’s side. His mahogany 
countenance was ridged with anger, his fawn- 
green eyes sparkling wickedly. 

“Condemnation! Carlisle,” he burst out, “yes- 
terday I never dreamed I would fight under your 
flag! To-day what is left for me to do? Look 
at my brigade leaders yonder — one, two, six of 
them from the Upper Country posts,” pointing 
them out with rapid stabs of his rifle muzzle, 
“speckled through Richelieu’s crew like the pits 
in his face! And when my brigade leaders pad- 
dle in his pay, Carlisle, I ask you where in creation 
are my brigades?” 

“Sleeping under the green ferns, Ralph,” 
Richelieu answered, swiftly, before Carlisle could 
speak. 

“You cursed slime! Who put them there?” 
flashed Wayne. 

Richelieu stiffly shrugged his military shoul- 
ders. 

“ Diablement , do I control the elements and 
the plagues? The Red Death raged, and the 
Red Death took whom it wished. Voilal It is 
the will of God. But my quarrel is not with 
you, Ralph Wayne> Non , nor with Mademoi- 
selle Joan. I will have^ word to your profit with 
both of you when I have finished with this ca- 
naille Carlisle, broken his barrier and razed his 
post to the ground.” 

Wayne half lifted his rifle stock to his cheek. 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 217 

“By the Doom — will you have a word with 
us?” 

Carlisle pressed Wayne’s rifle barrel down. 

“This is my business, Wayne,” he warned the 
Free-Trader. “Keep your weapons still. Get 
Joan back to the shore end yonder. She may 
be carried into the water if they try a rush.” 

Carlisle half turned to enforce his request on 
Wayne, for the instant lessening his vigilance, 
and in that moment of unwariness Richelieu 
thought to seize the advantage. 

“ffoZa/” he shouted, loudly, to his brigades. 
“Form the line!” 

Like lightning the paddles urged, the hind- 
most canoes drawing up on a level with the fore- 
most, edging in, bellying sidewise, jockeying like 
race-horses at the barrier, forming an unbroken 
line from shore to shore. All in a second they 
executed the manoeuvre with two or three darting 
paddle-flips, and as the prows evened and still 
glided in swift motion, Richelieu waved them 
forward. 

“Charge!” he ordered, and hurled them on 
with a violent gesture of his arm as if they had 
been a squadron in action. 

Like charging cavalry the canoes leaped 
ahead, like immense horses carrying many riders, 
the foam streaking from their noses, the spray 
spattering behind them, Richelieu towering in 
the bow of Todd’s craft as on the neck of a 
charger, leading them recklessly like the fearless 
soldier he was and whipping them to frenzy with 
the stinging lash of his tongue. 


218 


AMBUSH 


Straight at the boom they reared, but Carlisle 
sensed their trick. A canoe’s length away, the 
whole array would swerve broadside on and spill 
the Northwesters out on the boom with mo- 
mentum enough to carry all before them and 
sweep the Hudson’s Bay forces into the water. 

Richelieu was shrewd enough not to mass his 
attack in one spot but to batter the whole boom 
simultaneously. His force was almost equal 
to Carlisle’s and he knew that the swift rush of 
the canoes would dash his men upon the boom 
with a smashing impact that no merely station- 
ary force could withstand. It would be like a 
single line of infantry before galloping horsemen, 
overridden, crushed, shattered by sheer impetus. 

He knew that Carlisle knew it, too, and he 
passed a quick order along the line. 

“Shoot once!” he commanded. “Then jump 
for their canoes before they reach the boom!” 

Yelling demoniacally, the Northwesters were 
driving in, only a few yards distant. Todd’s 
canoe was surging fairly for Carlisle, Richelieu 
still upright in the bow, the flapping folds of the 
flag partly hiding his body but the ugly black- 
bearded face showing clear above, his mocking 
eyes gleaming over the barrel of the pistol he held 
in his hand. 

“Par Dieu! Carlisle,” he grinned. “It is the 
end of your strife, your company, your dream 
of mademoiselle!” 

Carlisle did not trouble to answer. His own 
pistol in his hand, he waited, his eyes never shift- 
ing from Richelieu, his body slightly bent for- 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 219 

ward from the hips, his moccasined feet gripping 
the wet bark of the logs. 

When the canoes were still two paddle-strokes 
away he saw the muzzle of Richelieu’s pistol flip 
upward, caught the puff of smoke, heard the 
weapon’s bark, felt the wind of the silent lead 
through his hair and its burning groove along his 
scalp. 

Straight into the black-bearded face he fired, 
but the swaying flagstaff snapped, while Riche- 
lieu still grinned there, mockingly, sardonically, 
sighting his pistol afresh in the rocking craft. 
But before either he or Carlisle could shoot again, 
Wayne’s long-barrelled rifle spat from the boom. 

Faint as a squib it went off at Carlisle’s ear in 
concert with the Hudson’s Bay men’s volley, 
but the effect was contrastingly violent. Riche- 
lieu, his weapon dropping with a splash, whirled 
half way round as if spun by an invisible hand. 
Todd’s canoe was just in the act of turning broad- 
side on to the boom, and the jerk catapulted the 
staggering Richelieu out of the swerving canoe 
bow. 

He landed limply, half in the water, half on 
the boom. Carlisle had a momentary glance of 
Andrews dragging his body out on the logs, of 
Wayne jamming in another charge, of the white- 
faced Joan beside him as he leaped from the 
boom before Todd’s canoe could touch it. 

All along the line the others leaped with him, 
and they landed with a wallowing splash close 
under the Northwesters’ whirling canoes. The 
Hudson’s Bay men knew the depth of the water. 


220 


AMBUSH 


a knowledge that their enemies lacked, and 
therein lay their advantage and Carlisle’s strat- 
egy. The total unexpectedness of the move 
lent it all the greater force, and the number of 
Carlisle’s officers distributed throughout the 
line ensured perfect unison of effort. 

Galt, Drummond, Lewis, Jarvis, Hampton, 
Garry, Lea, Missowa, and Waseyawin and the 
lesser clerks were personally responsible for the 
men under their command, and they saw to it 
that all moved in concert. 

Thus it was an unbroken row of men that 
barred an unbroken row of canoes, before the 
occupants of the canoes could jump from craft 
to boom, and seized their low-sunk gunwales. 
The clear-headed Todd smelled disaster the 
moment the Hudson’s Bay men launched 
through the air. 

“Hades! Look out!” he yelled to the other 
partners. “Back-water, all!” 

But Carlisle was too swift for him. A whir 
of the Factor’s hands and Todd’s canoe was up- 
side down, the fur packs on the bottom, Todd 
and his crew floundering in the water. 

Todd came up sputtering and cursing. His 
rifle-butt smashed down on Carlisle’s shoulder, 
but Carlisle skimmed the surface with a fist blow 
that caught Todd upon the chin and stretched 
him limp and floating. Scattering the Indian 
crew, he lunged on to overturn the nearest craft. 

Nor had his men been idle! Everywhere he 
looked he saw the Northwest canoes either cap- 
sized or in the act of being capsized by his men. 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 


221 


Up to their waists, sometimes to their armpits, 
in the icy water they offered small targets for 
Northwest violence while the canoes were easy 
prey. 

i Often top-heavy with crews and packs of fur, 
always hair-poised on their keelless bottoms, 
the birchbarks went over at the touch of a hand, 
the poke of a knee, or the solid push of a gun- 
butt. 

It was a weird sight to behold, whole brigades 
suddenly turning turtle, heeling on their gun- 
wales, rearing up on their sterns, spilling and 
sprawling arms, gear, men, and furs in all direc- 
tions. 

Some of the Hudson’s Bay men in their savage 
zeal paused not for the laying on of hands but 
struck through the birchbark skins of the canoes 
with knives and belt axes, scuttling the crafts 
at a stroke, sending the paddlers under like man- 
nikins in a biscuit box. 

Bitter was the amphibious battle through 
which Carlisle rampaged. Though they had 
lost their canoes, the Northwesters found their 
footing and resisted tenaciously. Many of their 
arms were sunk in the plunge, more they saved 
were plugged with mud and slime so that there 
was little shooting. 

They fought as their forefathers fought, with 
knife and club and knotted fist, a primitive horde 
battling like cavemen in the wilderness, raging 
in the churned, moiled river between steep 
benchlands under the blazing sun. 

High on those benchlands clustered the 


222 


AMBUSH 


womenkind of the tribes in action, all gay clothed 
in their calicoes, bright-cowled in their warm- 
coloured shawls, the squaws, the boys, the maid- 
ens, the moss-bagged papooses, even the husky 
dogs of the camp snarling and clipping their 
fangs over the conflict in the water below. 

In that wild moment the women far forgot 
their race stoicism and shrilled encouragement 
to their hunters, waved their gaudy silk hand- 
kerchiefs, beseeching their Good Spirit to help 
the Hudson’s Bay men, calling on their Evil One 
to blast the bold Northwesters. 

The hunters answered their cries with strident 
yells, their wet, swarthy arms glistening like 
bronze in the sunlight as, led by Missowa and 
Waseyawin, they carried the fight more fiercely 
to their foes. The Northwesters were beaten 
back from the boom they had hoped to break. 
Carlisle at the head of his men seized McLeod 
and bodily hurled him out on the farther shore. 

“Get the partners!” he shouted above the 
crazy din. “Smash the other partners and the 
whole crowd will break!” 

“Are ye no seem’ I ha’ got ane?” rumbled 
Lewis, sloshing in the water like a hippopotamus. 

He had a neck-hold on McGillivray, and even 
though Sager leaped upon his back he staggered 
out to the shallows, cast McGillivray into the 
saskatoon bushes like a discarded sack, and tore 
Sager off as a man would pluck a climbing 
cat. 

“Ane an’ twa!” he amended. “Where are 
yon ithers?” 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 223 

“Ba gar! here — dese two!” chuckled Drum- 
mond as he and Galt backed the McKenzies out 
on to the stranded ice-cakes with their hammer- 
ing gun-butts. 

Jarvis was smiting McDougall with his fists, 
fighting as he had fought many a London street 
fight in the years that were gone. He struck the 
Northwester at will upon the face and neck, all 
that showed above the rippling surface, but with- 
out warning McDougall drove his knee under 
water into Jarvis’s stomach and Jarvis staggered 
violently back against the boom. 

McDougall turned and madly splashed ashore* 
while Jarvis gazed after him with a surprise and 
agony on his Cockney face. 

“Stryke me blind in the blinkers! That’s 
a foul, I s’y !” he gasped, and promptly collapsed 
across the logs. 

Up-river a tremendous shout burst out. Car- 
lisle wheeled waist deep, and a triumphant laugh 
broke from him. 

“Wells is coming!” he encouraged his men. 
“ Now, all together ! Give them blue perdition ! ” 

Wells’s fleet was swinging round the Devil’s 
Elbow at a dizzy speed, the canoes boring for- 
ward in long jumps, throwing the water aside in 
rolling ridges, the paddles making the surface 
boil. They cheered as they came, all the loud- 
throated men of the Seepanock Channel, all the 
river scouts he had picked up on his way down. 

“Skin for skin!” they roared to their battling 
fellows, and the immersed warriors found breath 
to answer back. 


224 


AMBUSH 


“Long live the H. B. C.!” 

Fresh and strong and numerous Wells’s force 
struck the Northwesters in the back, and under 
the pressure of his advance they scattered for 
the shore like a herd of caribou to join their 
beaten leaders. Heading the rout, Carlisle saw 
a bedraggled figure he recognized, the hawk- 
nosed Dentaire with his moustache plastered 
over his cheeks. 

“ By Jove ! there he is ! ” Carlisle cried. “ Look, 
Eugene. Look, Galt. Dentaire — you remember? 
Did you ever know the like of that? Ready to 
die of fear of smallpox and never got it!” 

Dentaire heard Carlisle’s laugh and took it 
for an imputation on his bravery. 

“ Bon Dieu! can we fight enemies with our 
backs as well as our fronts? Also, it is of a cir- 
cumstance condemnable that our leaders run 
away. It’s all over with us ! ” 

He gesticulated frantically while all the other 
partners cursed him as they drew out the injured 
Todd and many more before they broke and 
clawed a way up over the benchland and off 
through the park lands. 

“Missowa! Waseyawin!” Carlisle ordered. 
“Take the Indian hunters and trail them well 
clear of the river. Without canoes or many arms 
they’ll have to beat a way south to the Assini- 
boine trails, so don’t bother them any further 
than to see that they keep moving. Lewis, take 
Jarvis and the rest of the hurt men up to the 
post.” 

“You, Galt, have Spotted Deer get ready to 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 


££5 


take my dispatch to James Bay and then get 
plenty of men to pry out that jam in the chasm. 
This place ought to drain by night, and we’ll 
pick the fur packs and gear off the dry bottom. 
And you, Eugene, look after the canoes and 
salvage what you can.” 

Amid fresh, joyful shrieks from their squaws, 
the hunters scrambled away on their mission, 
and Lewis and Galt set about their respective 
tasks, while Carlisle waded back to the boom 
with Eugene. 

Since the struggle began, he had had no op- 
portunity even to glance aside to where he had 
left the others, but now he saw them in the same 
spot. Andrews bent over the prostrate Riche- 
lieu lying on the logs, Wayne standing beside 
with his rifle-butt grounded and Joan beckoning 
with anxious hands. 

“ Diable /” exclaimed Eugene. “W’at she be 
want now? W’at’s wrong dere? I ain’t be see 
any wan.” 

“It’s Richelieu,” deduced Carlisle. “ He must 
be badly hurt. Go on and attend to the canoes, 
Eugene, before they get smashed up with floating 
ice.” 

He lunged ahead where Todd’s canoe with 
Richelieu’s broken flagstaff in the bow lay half 
crushed against the boom and drew himself up 
dripping on the logs. 

“What’s the matter, Joan?” he asked. “Is 
he badly wounded?” 

“Andrews says he’s going to die,” she told 
him. “And he wants you. Hurry up!” 


226 


AMBUSH 


“Here, Paul,” begged Andrews, “stand over 
where he can see you.” 

Carlisle stepped over with Joan to where her 
father leaned on his rifle by Richelieu’s side. The 
Northwester lay in the groove between two of 
the three rows of logs in the triple boom, his 
shoulders supported by Andrews. At first glance 
Carlisle noted where Wayne’s bullet had pierced 
his uniform high and to the left of the middle 
of his breast. 

There was little blood staining it above, but 
underneath the bark was red, and his breathing 
came in long, irregular gasps. His black-bearded 
face was sombre with an unearthly sombreness 
on account of the pallor of the skin wherein the 
sunken pox-pits showed a bluish tinge. His 
eyelids lay shut, but at Andrews’ whisper he 
opened them and stared weakly up into Carlisle’s 
wondering face. 

“j Dieu!” he murmured, his eyes turning to 
Andrews. “It is my last breath, and it is good 
that it goes into confession, Father. I have 
lived in sin. That goes without saying. But I 
will not sink eternally into hell. Oui, and that 
is why I make confession openly and to all.” 

He paused, breathing heavily, while his eyes 
went back to Carlisle, to Joan, and then to 
Wayne. 

“It was I, Wayne,” he confessed with electri- 
fying unexpectedness. “That day, in the Wyom- 
ing Valley — that old day of Butler’s Raid! Mon 
Dieu! you knew I loved her, but you did not know 
how much. I was young. I was a lieutenant. 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 


227 

I was mad. In the panic of the raid I thought to 
make her ride away with me, but she was true. 
Ciel ! yes, she was true, and I — • — ” 

He stopped, and Wayne gazed at him as a 
man of stone, an inanimate thing that cannot 
comprehend. Then, sudden as his wrath, the 
full import of Richelieu’s words flashed upon 
him, and he changed from a man of stone to a 
livid, quivering demon. Often as Carlisle had 
seen him in anger, he had never seen anything 
like the light that instantly fused his fawn-green 
eyes to incandescence. 

It was as if all the fires of hell suddenly struck 
them and were glanced back. He opened his 
mouth, but not a word came forth. Then with 
an animal-like snarl he raised his rifle like a giant 
pestle in both hands, the butt poising over Riche- 
lieu’s head as if to stamp out some vermin or 
reptile, some monstrous abortion that he had 
glimpsed in all its vileness. 

Carlisle and Joan threw themselves upon him 
from either hand, Carlisle’s grip locking his arms 
to his side. He raged like a fiend, but the Fac- 
tor’s great strength held him back, their bodies 
swaying from side to side on the logs, and as they 
swayed Richelieu began to speak again. 

“Voila! And then I lied. I took you, 
Wayne, and told my story but named another 
man. I hated him. Oui , you do not know how I 
hated then, in my youth. I hated Charlie Carlisle 
for I knew he loved her, too. So I laid my wrong 
upon him because he could not deny. Comment? 
No, he could not deny, wounded and drunk as he 


228 


AMBUSH 


was. They were all drunk that day, and he 
knew not whether he fought man, woman, or 
child, one or one thousand of them.” 

“My God!” breathed Carlisle, swift anger 
overwhelming the vibrant thrill that Riche- 
lieu’s first words had sent pulsing through him . 4 
“You did that?” 

He loosed his grip from Wayne, and oddly 
enough the surge of wrath in Carlisle left Wayne 
quiescent. He was a man of stone once more 
with one hand pressing on his rifle-barrel, the 
other hand passed around Joan’s waist. 

Carlisle leaned over Richelieu, his face con- 
torted with mingled emotion, righteous indigna- 
tion, horror, disgust, suspense. 

“My God, man — you did that?” he repeated. 

“Oia,” and the head nodded feebly, “but I 
knew his life would not be worth a franc while 
Wayne knew he was alive, and I had blood 
enough on my hands. So I smuggled him away 
till the heat of the day had died out of him, and 
then I told him what he had done.” 

“You incarnate fiend!” choked Carlisle, for 
into his mind rose the vision of his father as he 
had known him — tall, straight, handsome, the 
pride of his boyish eyes in the dashing uniform 
of a captain of the Rangers. 

“Just so! He knew he would not have his 
life long if he stayed. And who could face his 
friends or his own flesh with that stain upon him? 
He disappeared, and one day a priest came into 
the post of Niagara to care for his boy.” 

“Who, pray?” 


A SKIN FOR A SKIN 


229 


4 ‘Father Andrews here!” 

Carlisle leaned lower, his face abruptly charged 
with red bood. 

“And he lived — lives yet?” he demanded. 

“Why not? I have lived — till now. Wayne 
lives. Why not Charlie Carlisle? Take my 
word for it. If you don’t take my word for it, 
ask Father Andrews here. Charlie Carlisle paid 
him to keep his secret and to raise you, and he 
knows. But be quick. I am weakening fast, 
and Andrews must give me absolution.” 

“Andrews — Andrews!” cried Carlisle, torn 
with emotion. “My father’s alive?” 

“Yes, Paul — yes.” 

“You know where he is?” 

“Yes.” 

“And you’ll take me to him now — I mean, 
soon, without delay?” 

“Yes, soon,” promised Andrews. “When 
we go down to Grande Portage I’ll take you to 
him. Now go, quickly. Don’t you see Riche- 
lieu’s at his last breath?” 

Andrews bent over Richelieu to give him final 
absolution, and Carlisle, with his heart in a 
tumult and his face alight, turned away to 
Wayne and Joan. Joan’s eyes were shining 
into his through a film of moisture, but Wayne 
still stood like an image staring stonily at the 
strange confessional. Then he raised his eyes to 
Carlisle’s and put out his gnarled hand. 

“Richelieu isn’t the only one who wronged 
you, Carlisle!” he exclaimed with a depth of 
feeling that shook his chest. “I’ve put a ter- 


230 


AMBUSH 


rible wrong on you — on both you and your 
father.” 

“But, Wayne, you can make it right,” smiled 
Carlisle, clasping the gnarled fist with one hand 
and significantly taking Joan’s soft palm with 
the other. “All in a minute you can make it 
right.” 

Wayne looked from one to the other, and an 
ancient tenderness, a memory of vanished years, 
seemed to creep into his stony mahogany face. 
His mask broke suddenly, and the tears ran 
down his cheeks. 

“By the Doom, Carlisle,” he muttered, laying 
his hands upon their shoulders, “I make it 
right.” 


CHAPTER FOURTEEN 


IN THE TEMPLE OF THE WILD 

“ Grande Portage at last, father!” exclaimed 
Joan, using words she had used a full year before 
as the Factor’s craft grazed the Port Charlotte 
landing on the Pigeon River’s bank. “It is 
good to get the canoe cramps out.” 

“Yes, Joan,” nodded Wayne, a smile cracking 
the grim mahogany of his face as recollection 
stirred within him. “It’s been a long day, but 
here’s a nine-mile walk to stretch your legs.” 

“And not a packer to clutter up the trail!” 
laughed Carlisle, giving Joan his hand to help 
her out. “Look at Port Charlotte — empty as a 
last year’s bird’s nest! Look at the Portage — 
deserted to the skyline! We’ll have a quick 
passage over.” 

Twelve months before he had gone into Cum- 
berland House with a lone canoe. Now he had 
come out down the Saskatchewan, Lake Winni- 
peg, through the Winnipeg River, the Lake of 
the Woods, Rainy Lake, and the Pigeon River 
with a fleet of fifteen hundred paddles. As he 
turned off up the trail with Joan, followed by 
Wayne and Andrews, he waved a sign to his bri- 
gade leader, Drummond, to unload the massed 
brigades and pack over after him. 

231 


232 


AMBUSH 


Side by side in the warm glow of the July 
evening he and Joan climbed up over the three 
miles of gentle convolutions that terraced the 
way to the loftiest ridge before they looked back, 
and when they glanced around they beheld an 
unbroken line of pack-laden men crawling up- 
ward with the slow, peculiar, bobbing motion 
that packs in the tump-line impart. 

The sight brought home more clearly to Joan 
the memory of that other evening when Carlisle 
and Andrews had come over the Portage with 
their warning, and she began to laugh softly in 
low, throaty notes that blended with songs of 
the thrushes by the trailside. 

“Do you remember, Paul, how you came 
to tell us the Portage was closed? You were a 
Northwest mail-courier in black cotton shirt, 
mackinaw trousers, cowhide moccasins, and a 
battered, blue felt hat. Yes, and your face was 
stained as brown as an Indian’s. Do you re- 
member?” 

“Yes,” nodded Carlisle, “I remember that 
masquerade, all right, and I remember how I 
cursed it when you came.” 

“Why?” she teased, “because it was so 
dirty?” 

“No, you cherished hypocrite, because I 
wanted you to know me as I was. I wanted 
to stand in the skin God gave me.” 

“Conceited thing!” Joan bantered. “As if 
that amounted to much! And as if I cared at 
all!” 

She fluted out her laughter freely as she darted 


IN THE TEMPLE OF THE WILD 233 

down the Grande Portage slope of the trail, 
away from the reach of his impulsive arm. Grace- 
ful as a fawn she ran, breaking into song in the 
sheer joy of her surroundings and inner being, 
and Carlisle, his heart singing, too, in anticipation 
of the union and the reunion that was to be, 
sprang lightly after. 

They swish-swished in their moccasins across 
the corduroy paths of the beaver meadows, over 
the small, bridged creeks, down the hundred - 
foot gulches that dropped like steps toward 
Lake Superior. Through the patches of poplar 
and birch and the heart of the grand pinery they 
descended, now slowly to a walk, now quicken- 
ing to a run, till they traversed the last mile of 
the long slope and came out into the clearing 
close to the Northwest post. 

As at Port Charlotte and along the whole 
length of the Portage, there was not a man to 
be seen. Yet men had been here not long before, 
for in the canoe harbour the recovered fur sloop 
Otter and many big Rabiscaw canoes from Mon- 
treal were tied, and upon the curving sand beach 
burned the evening fires of the canoemen. 

Breathing themselves while they waited for 
the others, Carlisle and Joan stared at the scene 
before them with the sympathetic eyes of chil- 
dren blooded to the wild. Afar surged the vast 
green expanse of Lake Superior gilded with the 
molten wash of gold spilled over the high, wooded 
mainland ridge where the Pigeon River brawled 
down to its rest on the mighty bosom, scrolled 
with its white-crested waves. 


234 


AMBUSH 


Nearer at hand spread the channel, a mile and 
one quarter wide, screened by the tree-crowned 
island that almost yielded to the primeval em- 
brace of the mainland. As they had seen it a 
year before, so they saw it now, the sheltering 
island with its rubble of great, gnarled boulders 
littering the beach, its long, sloping point sheer- 
ing up and its rampart of bush standing solid 
above. 

Their eyes followed the amphitheatre of the 
bay, a crescent sweep of shallow water, delicate 
green in colour and clear as air, edged by a low, 
flat shore that was backed in turn by terraced 
Laurentian hills. 

Tier upon tier the hills rose as of old, the lowest 
three hundred feet in height, the highest more 
than one thousand, covered with crowding forest 
of birch and spruce and pine thrusting out virgin 
arms to embrace the lesser island. Yonder was 
the natural barrier, the forty-foot cliff of rock 
walling the back of the level shoreland and 
curving westward into the lake. Not a tree nor 
a stone was changed or gone! 

Along the eastern side foamed the small 
stream in unvaried volume, and there, without 
addition or diminution, the post buildings 
crouched behind their eighteen-foot cedar pal- 
ings with the gate fast closed, while the same tent 
villages and teepees and cabins dotted the east- 
ern bank of the stream with the same cattle 
grazing on the meadows and terraces farther 
back. 

In the midst of their silent gazing they heard 


IN THE TEMPLE OF THE WILD 


235 


the feet of Wayne and Andrews and the packers 
behind, and with one accord they moved on 
along the path that led to the closed gate of the 
post. 

Eighteen feet in the air Thompson’s quizzical 
Welsh face peered down at them over the top of 

t np nQncqnpc 

“By St. John, Carlisle!” he greeted. “Art 
here, then? Had word of ’ee. Hast come in 
peace or in war?” 

“In peace, Davvy, old friend,” laughed Car- 
lisle. “There’s no need to trouble you. Open 
the gate.” 

“Ha! Is good news,” grinned Davvy. “Wouldst 
not want tuh slaying of all with my own hands. 
Am all alone here.” 

Joan, Carlisle, and the rest burst into hearty 
laughter as Thompson’s head disappeared from 
the palisades to reappear a moment later in the 
open entrance. 

“That was a bold front you put on for a soli- 
tary man, Davvy,” chaffed Carlisle, shaking his 
hand prodigiously. “I wondered why Port 
Charlotte and the Portage were deserted.” 

“Word of thy doings came down tuh water- 
ways,” Thompson explained, “and not a man 
wouldst stay. The Eastern partners wouldst 
not come past tuh Kaministiquia, and tuh In- 
dians and tuh Montreal paddlers here took to 
tuh bush.” 

“They don’t need to be alarmed,” Carlisle 
assured him. “All we want is a peaceful pas- 
sage. You see, Davvy, the Hudson’s Bay 


236 


AMBUSH 


Company has smashed the Northwesters to 
pieces in the hinterland, and the absorption of 
the pieces will not be long delayed. Amalgama- 
tion is coming, old friend, and you yourself will 
be back with us again.” 

“By St. John! Dost say so, old roamer? 
Wilt not grieve me any if canst keep clear of 
Colen. Hast loved thee like a brother, Carlisle, 
and wilt go with a good heart if tuh Hudson’s 
Bay takes tuh Northwest Company over. Wilt 
be no trade this summer anyway, so wast think- 
ing of going West to hew a new pass over tuh 
Rockies.” 

“Then you’ll hew it for the Hudson’s Bay 
Company in the end, Davvy.” 

Thompson shrugged his shoulders. 

“What matter, Carlisle? Tuh land is bigger 
than any institution, is greater than its furs. 
Wilt be an empire in tuh end of all. And thou? 
Art going to James Bay?” 

“Yes, Davvy.” 

“Art stopping tuh night here?” 

“No, we’ll travel the lake when the breeze 
dies down. To-morrow we may have to lie up 
wind-bound on the shore. Will you give Miss 
Wayne and Father Andrews the use of your post 
for a few minutes? She wants to put on another 
dress, and Andrews a new cassock.” 

“Wilt give me pleasure,” agreed Thompson, 
saluting Joan and the others gravely. “But 
what is tuh purpose?” 

“Davvy,” smiled Carlisle, “the last time I 
was here as a mail-courier I had a hand in saving 


IN THE TEMPLE OF THE WILD 237 

a certain young lady from being carried off 
against her will. Now she’s being carried off 
with her own consent.” 

Thompson’s eyes opened wide, his face creased 
in a grin of remembrance and comprehension, 
and he suddenly extended his hand to the girl. 

“Ha! Is that, then? Wilt congratulate you, 
Miss Wayne. Yon dirty courier is lucky man. 
Art most beautiful woman hast ever seen. Come 
in. Wilt give ’ee my own house for tuh purpose, 
you and tuh priest.” 

He led Joan and Andrews inside, while Car- 
lisle and Wayne passed on to the beach where 
the first packers were letting down the canoes 
and fur bales, and more and more were arriving 
every minute in the gathering dusk and slipping 
their tump-lines to the ground. 

Carlisle knew such a freight of fur throughout 
the whole history of the fur trade had never 
come over the Grande Portage in a single season. 
Not only the vast catch of the Hudson’s Bay 
Company was in transit but also the large take 
of the Northwest Company which he had cap- 
tured from Richelieu, the McKenzies, Todd, 
McLeod, McDougall, McGillivray, and Sager 
in the Devil’s Elbow. 

Their yearly turnover, greater than any other 
turnover known in America, had turned to his 
hands, and it would continue so to turn. Vast 
as had been the institution of the Northwesters, 
it was, like the trust of the Free-Traders, shaken 
to its foundations by a combination of organized 
warfare and Divine visitation. 


238 


AMBUSH 


The Montreal brigades of rivermen were here, 
slinking in the woods, but this year the North- 
men from the Pays d’en Haut would not gather 
to meet them. 

Grande Portage was an open road, not a pri- 
vate gateway to the West, and though it would 
be used for some time by his company as an 
entrep6t for inland business and as an outlet on 
Superior, Carlisle saw in his mind’s eye a chang- 
ing of the routes by which the fur would all flow 
to Hudson’s Bay instead of to Montreal. 

He pictured the dwindling of the Grande 
Portage, the spot where the brains of the North- 
west Company had been situated though its 
nominal headquarters posed in Beaver Hall, the 
spot from which the ruthless power of the organ- 
ization was distributed in stupendous ramifica- 
tions, like electric energy from a distant water- 
fall. And in the end he saw the post dismantled, 
its foundations buried in the sand and scrub, 
the Portage unused, the Western highway for- 
gotten! 

Something of the same thought was running 
through Wayne’s mind as he watched the pack- 
ing down and the relaunching and reloading 
of the canoes, and Carlisle, turning to speak to 
him, caught it in his eye. 

“ You see it, too, Wayne?” he ventured. “You 
see the glory departing from this place?” 

“Yes, it’s sure to go down now,” prophesied 
Wayne, his eyes fixed seer-like, “and the first 
wagon road linking up the East and the West 
will carve its epitaph.” 


IN THE TEMPLE OF THE WILD £39 

“Sometimes I see a road of my own,” Carlisle 
confided, “from the Pays d’en Haut to Hudson’s 
Bay. Yes, and sometimes I even see the shoals 
of the bay gouged out and a regular fleet of ships 
sailing there. It’s going to be as Thompson 
says, a country bigger than any individual, 
bigger than any institution, an empire in the end. 
Furthermore, it’s going to be an empire no man 
can be ashamed of, Wayne. Why not have a 
hand in its making?” 

Wayne shook his head, disconsolately. 

“No, I’m going back when we reach Michi- 
picoten, back to the Wyoming Valley. It was 
unrest drove me out, Carlisle. It’s rest, content, 
that’s taking me home.” 

“ But you’ll come sometimes, come to see her? ” 

“Every year in the spring — when the wander- 
lust stirs! During the months I won’t see her 
I tell you I’ll be very lonely, Carlisle. But don’t 
let her know that. Never a word. Look out — 
here she comes ! ” 

She was coming out of the post with Thomp- 
son and Andrews and time was suddenly tele- 
scoped for Carlisle. He beheld her as he had first 
beheld her that evening she had stepped out of 
her father’s canoe at Port Charlotte, and as he 
gazed at her he had the mystic feeling that this 
was that very moment. There had been no long, 
hard, danger-ridden months, no bitter blood 
feud, no deadly rivalry between. 

Here glided her swelling-hipped, full-bosomed 
figure, erect, agile, supple in poise, with the grace- 
ful strength in the curves of the limbs, as it had 


240 


AMBUSH 


first glided into his consciousness. Here shim- 
mered her radiant hair, yellow, wheaten, spun- 
gold all in one, like the mingling hues of the 
birchen leaves in autumn, framing the laugh- 
ing-eyed, crimson-sprayed, red-lipped face. 

Only, she wore the clinging champagne- 
coloured dress of silk that she had worn at An- 
drews’ first open-air service on the shores of 
Pine Island Lake, the snow-white doeskin half- 
moccasins peeping from underneath, the single 
jewel at her throat. 

Carlisle caught his breath deeply as he walked 
out with Wayne upon the shore way of the canoe 
pier, his ermine canoe-robe over his shoulder. On 
the eastern or harbour arm of the crib work that 
extended but halfway back to land he spread the 
robe for Joan’s feet and stood upon it with her, 
Wayne at their side, Andrews in front. 

In the crystal-clear water of the canoe har- 
bour at their feet floated his huge six-fathom craft 
with the Hudson’s Bay Company’s crimson flag 
in the bow, his own streaming gonfalon in the 
stem. His tried crew were poised in their places, 
Waseyawin in the bow, Missowa in the stern, the 
two middlemen paired forward, the two others 
paired aft, their paddle shafts decorated with the 
gaudy woollen streamers; their bright-beaded 
moccasins, gay leggings, flaming belts and scarfs 
flashing many hues; their black-haired, fillet- 
bound heads carrying the long, graceful, slanting, 
violent-coloured plumes that proclaimed them 
Factor’s canoemen. 

Close beside nosed the canoes of the officers — 


IN THE TEMPLE OF THE WILD 241 

Galt, Drummond, Lewis, Garry, Lea, Jarvis, 
Hampton, Wells — while behind them the massed 
brigades covered the entire canoe harbour, the 
blood-red stars burning upon their warm yellow 
bows like the fires upon the beach. 

Alone by the fires stood Thompson, sole guest 
of the Northwest Company, till presently the 
Montreal brigades lurking in the woods on either 
hand took heart to emerge. They had marked the 
Hudson’s Bay Company’s fleet all afloat, marked 
how things were shaping on the pier, and crept 
out, 350 of them, to gather silently around on 
the sandy flat — the giant Pork Eaters, French 
voyageurs off the Ottawa River and the parishes 
around, Iroquois Indians, Caughnawaga Indians, 
the famed rivermen of the Rabiscaws. 

A tamed, voiceless host they gathered, for this 
season their carnival among the Northmen would 
not ring, their carousal would not rage with 
their songs and their boissons and their deviltry, 
and for them the code of the law was written 
farther than the Sault. 

They stared in wonder while the same priest 
they had seen in Grande Portage the year before 
raised his voice from the rude altar of the canoe 
pier in the spruce-walled, starry-naved temple 
of the wild. 

“On the winds of the wilderness and to you 
dwellers in the wilderness,” he declaimed, “I 
publish the banns!” 

Sonorously Andrews’ voice sounded as he went 
on to complete the ceremony, and, even as he 
finished, the shade of Bertand the Montreal mail- 


242 


AMBUSH 


courier seemed to rise from the depths of Grande 
Portage Bay. 

There came the snoring surge of waters swiftly 
cloven, a triumphant yell out of the lakeward 
dark, the thump of a quickly wielded paddle 
upon a canoe gunwale, and the next instant a 
lone birchbark craft tore through the water-gate 
of the pier and spilled its lone occupant on the 
cribwork at their feet. 

“Spotted Deer!” exclaimed Carlisle, recog- 
nizing the Cree dispatch-bearer he had sent down 
to James Bay by the Hayes with the report of 
victory for the governor. 

“Ae,” replied Spotted Deer, “with the sun and 
the stars I have paddled to meet you here.” 

He held out a dispatch that bore the gover- 
nor’s seal. 

Hastily Carlisle broke it open and glanced it 
over in the red flare that the camp-fires sent 
across the water. His hand shook a little as he 
passed it on to Andrews. 

“Read it out, Andrews,” he begged. “It 
concerns them all as well as me.” 

Andrews read aloud: 

I was overjoyed to get the news of the Northwesters* 
defeat. Its consequences will be far-reaching indeed. It 
means no less than the conserving of our charter till such 
time as we see fit to surrender it. It means the founding 
of a Western empire which we shall pioneer. 

Words cannot express my delight and my satisfaction 
at the trust I had in you, and I want to record that trust in 
a more material way. As I wrote you, the James Bay 
climate has been hard on me. The doctor here at York 
Factory says I have no option but to leave. 


IN THE TEMPLE OF THE WILD 243 

So I must sail on the London fur vessel this summer. 
I shall carry my resignation with me, and you I have ap- 
pointed temporary governor in my stead till I reach England 
and have the London Committee ratify the appointment. 
Any appointments you may think due those under you I 
shall also slate accordingly, as one of my last acts before 
giving up the governorship. 

Spotted Deer speaks of a rumour that runs hinting of 
another honour you will win. My sincerest congratula- 
tions and the hope to see you both soon! I am arranging 
a grand reception for you when you reach James Bay. 

“Paul — Paul!” breathed Joan, tensely, while 
Carlisle, his eyes shining into hers, mutely 
pressed her hands. 

“You dwellers in the wilderness, I introduce 
Governor Carlisle and his wife!” announced 
Andrews, handing the dispatch back and step- 
ping aside. 

From the massed brigades a vociferous cheer 
thundered out, and simultaneously the fifteen 
hundred paddles poised in perpendicular salute, 
the crimson firelight flashing from the blades. 

Carlisle acknowledged the salute with upraised 
hand and began to speak in resonant tones 
fraught with deep emotion. 

“Men of the Hudson’s Bay, I take the gover- 
nor at his word. You have earned more than 
any men may get in this world, but this much 
at least may be yours. To Galt, Lewis, Lea, 
Garry, Hampton, Jarvis, and Wells I give the 
permanent Factorships, of Cumberland House, 
the Pas, the Nepowin, Moose Lake, Chimawawin, 
Grand Rapids, and the Carrot River. 

“Waseyawin, Missowa, and their middlemen 


244 


AMBUSH 


are no longer Factor’s crew. They are Gover- 
nor’s crew, and to the middlemen I add Smoking 
Pine and Spotted Deer. And you, Drummond, 
I make chief Brigade Leader of all the Hudson’s 
Bay Company’s brigades.” 

A second time the vociferous cheer thundered 
out, the generous-hearted tribute of the brigade 
men to these honoured officers, and the officers 
in grim pride acknowledged the tribute — all but 
Eugene Drummond. 

His diable mystery was dissolving at last, and, 
unthinking of his high appointment, his volatile 
face worked, his milk-white teeth gleamed, his 
thin nostrils quivered, his coal-black eyes danced 
as he stared at Andrews on the pier loosing the 
cord to drop his brand-new cassock and pull 
away the mosquito veil. 

“ Mon Dieu!” cried Eugene, gesticulating with 
outstretched finger and streaming his raven hair 
this way and that with nervous head jerks. 
“ Mon Dieu ! — look dere!” 

Carlisle, Joan, and Wayne wheeled swiftly, but 
Andrews was not there. 

By the discarded cassock and mosquito veil 
stood a tall, straight, handsome, gray-haired, 
grave-faced stranger in the ancient but dashing 
uniform of Butler’s Rangers. 

“By the Doom — Captain Charles Carlisle!” 
identified Wayne. 


THE END 


C 38 6 

8 564 










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